Social Media in the Classroom - University Chronicle

Twenty years ago, the best way to contact professors was to go to their office. Now, students only need to fire up their computers.


Traditionally, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Skype have been used for entertainment purposes, but recently, their integration into the classroom has changed the landscape of post-secondary education. Educators are slowly realizing that these tools can be used to bridge the generational gap between themselves and their students.

Heidi Everett, an English professor at SCSU, said that implementing social media into the classroom is the future.


“We need to step up,” Everett said. “More importantly we need to teach appropriate navigation among the vehicles. For example, it is not acceptable to include ‘OMG’ and ‘WTF’ in a professional post, unless you have a very specific niche audience.”


Realizing that social media is the future of the classroom, Everett herself has stepped up and incorporated Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress blogs into her business writing and advanced civic writing classes. In her business writing class, she has students maintain a communications blog and use Twitter to drive traffic into those blogs.

“Their final project is a strategic initiative that they need to generate interest in, as well as keep key constituents informed through a variety of communication sources,” Everett said.



Everett sees multiple benefits with using social media in the classroom. She said that social media platforms help to teach integration and “allow for discussions about appropriate content in an environment that students are accustomed to, but don’t usually think about.”

“Younger generations seem to be pretty open with information, good and bad,” Everett said. “Learning to discern appropriate and inappropriate content is essential.


“Once something is on the Internet, it is there for life,” Josephson said, “so if I have to make a student do a controversial paper about race, abortion, or some other touchy subject, it could impact their career, or worse, their life.”

“As scholars, we need to understand how our once rigid communications landscape is changing,” Everett said.
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American schools are not experimenting with the use of social media as much as other countries, a problem which he says may cause us to lose the technology race.

Skype can be used to extend his office hours.

Other countries are using Facebook and Skype and making great progress with it, but since they do not speak English, we don’t pay attention to them...

Skype would work well for bringing in guest speakers who would not have been able to speak otherwise.

...the use of so much technology within the classroom may cause a student’s personal life to leak into their school life; however, he believes this issue can be abated if professors have the proper mindset when dealing with social media. He said that professors need to realize that social media should be used as a tool for education, not as a tool to get to know their students better.


Though there are both negative and positive aspects of using social media in various environments, technology is slowly becoming more and more integrated into society’s norms. Facebook, Skype, and other social media platforms are rapidly expanding from solely entertainment purposes to educational environments. Whether students are willing to embrace the change or not, they will eventually play a huge role in determining exactly where this new direction leads.

For more information about social media at SCSU, you can visit the social media directory at http://www.stcloudstate.edu/news/socialmedia.asp