Social Media in the ELA Classroom

     'Social Media' and 'classroom' don't seem like they'd be part of the same blog post considering teachers often collect phones and prohibit them from being used in the classroom, but here we are. I'll admit, social media as a whole is a bit foreign to me. I wasn't allowed to have it growing up, so I went my whole K-12 experience social media free. I've now had Snapchat for 13 months and Instagram for almost 6 months. No TikTok, Twitter, Facebook (which I'm actually surprised by the number of college students that have Facebook; it is a decent amount). Needless to say, I do not consider myself any type of social media expert, which is why this unit was so interesting to me. 

    Some of my biggest takeaways from this unit came from a journal article we read titled "Middle School Students' Social Media Use", and I think the title speaks for itself. Statistics are used to show the risks of social media use at such a young age. It was published in 2018, and while that doesn't make it seem outdated, I would also suggest that with technology, things change very rapidly, and I would like to see how the statistics have changed and would be in 2023. Furthermore, one survey that the  authors pulled from was from 2009, in which 404 middle schoolers were surveyed and "Approximately 28% of the participants reported being harassed or bullied on social media sites". Authors Martin, C. Wang, Petty, W. Wang, and Wilkins go on to discuss the dangers of social media including cyberbullying, digital netiquette, digital footprints, digital privacy, and digital identity. 

    So, does this mean that social media is bad and should be prohibited from young people forever? No, it just means that kids need to be taught the proper way to use social media.

    How can we use social media to our advantage then?

    We read another article by Richard and Cynthia Selfe titled "'Convince Me!' Valuing Multimodal Literacies and Composing Public Service Announcements". In it, they mention an assignment that can be done in ELA classrooms involving Public Service Announcements (PSA's). Students pick a social issue to research, and after listening and watching other PSA's, they record and film their own PSA's. (This also tackles multimodal expression, which I wrote about in the last blog post).

    In a discussion board that my class had, I mentioned how I would alter the assignment if I were teaching it. I said that since sometimes PSA's get a little too personal or controversial, I would have students make their PSA's on a "fake issue", and the example that I used was warning people about little girls that break into houses, break furniture, eat porridge, and sleep in your bed, in reference to Goldilocks. It still has the same idea of the original assignment while being more lighthearted. 

    In an article titled "You All Made Dank Memes: Using Internet Memes to Promote Critical Thinking" the author talks about students creating their own internet memes about a political issue. "The writing requirement for the meme encouraged students to question their own thinking about political issues and make their own evidence-based political arguments. Beyond the relevance to the American politics course, the activity encourages students to be more critical of the content of the Internet memes they are exposed to on social media" (Wells). Since most people nowadays use the internet and social media to get their news, they need to be able to decipher what's real and what's not, especially when it comes in the form of an internet meme.