Let’s dive into the older grades right now. What is one of their main focuses outside of school? Friends, and social media. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are not going away anytime soon, so why push them away when we can embrace it, utilize it, and have our students more involved and intrigued? While using actual social media may not be ideal in a classroom, let’s look into different, safer ways to recreate social media in your classrooms, or even during remote learning!
Twitter: Create a Twitter handle and bio for characters in books, historical figures, or current politicians, and more! Let the students create the tweets for the character using the language of the book mixed with current language. For example: What would Macbeth’s Twitter look like? What would his status updates look like in specific scenes? Who would he be following, and what pictures would he post?
How do we do this in a safe way? Create a shareable google doc and have students create the twitter profile on there. It can be as extravagant as adding in pictures and formatting it to look similar to Twitter, or more simple with just text on a page. This is useable for distant learning as well because it can be created all online and shared between students and teachers.
Instagram: What would Instagram posts and stories look like for characters, historical figures, or politicians? Let’s give those math teachers some love. Have your students make an Instagram story, “Math Concept for Dummies” with someone giving a funny, quick tutorial on how to do the latest concept learned. Use google slides for Instagram stories and docs for posts.
Facebook: Status updates, friend requests, pages they like, etc. Again, Google’s shareable documents are great for this collaborative project.
TikTok: Facebook most likely seems out-of-date for many of today’s students. TikTok is where the trending is happening. (I’m not even sure if I’m saying that right, I’m still stuck in the Facebook era myself). Have your students make content relevant videos on iPads and use the built-in movie maker to create TikTok like content.
Social media is a big part of our lives, and especially our student’s lives! Let’s embrace it! Pull it in close and bring it to every relevant classroom! There are so many other social media outlets and ideas we can be creating every day. My intention with this post wasn’t to give you already made lesson plans but to get your wheels turning for how you can easily implement this in your classroom, especially during this distant learning time.
If you have or are going to use this in your classroom, share it with us! We would love to see how social media is being used in classrooms. If you would like more direction/ information on this, please reach out to me directly.