Social media in the South African classroom

Using social media in the classroom (and outside the classroom) is a fantastic idea that creates room for engaging, relevant and culturally diverse discussions and learning. It opens up a whole other world where learning can take place. It facilitates the idea of pedagogy that is not just learning and teaching in a confined time and space, but creating a journey of learning, and an awe and desire for constant discovery and education. With social media, students can mould and shape their learning to their own interests. By this I mean that a child could share their own personal, day-to-day experiences that are related to the topics being taught in school. This develops the concept that learning does not stop at 2:30 on a weekday but that it should permeate into all aspects of life. 

Twitter and Instagram are platforms for sharing thoughts, ideas and photos. These can all be filtered through hashtags, allowing people to catagorise their posts that they see and share. This allows for an easy way to separate private posts and school related posts.

YouTube is a great way for students to find out more by themselves or to even share their own knowledge through videos.

Blogging facilitates the interaction and conversation between students and other students’ ideas through comments. Comments allow for an immediate response a possible resulting discussion about the subject matter.

I think school has become a bland, deadline-based, raw content method of educating. I understand why this has become ‘necessary’ to an extent, and for some students, this works for them. Social media and this digitised teaching allows for an extra level or add-on to learning that was not possible before. We should embrace this opportunity and try to utilise it as effectively as possible in our classrooms. Care must be taken, however that by using technology in schools, we do not exclude some pupils. I think this is a very important ‘warning’ especially in South Africa.

Last Friday I got internet in my flat for the first time this year, and what a relief it was! Having cut out all the ‘non-essential’ internet drainers (such as Facebook and Instagram), I was still left with the problem of accessing varsity work. Thankfully, Stellenbosch University provides computer areas and free internet access to school work on campus. This allowed me to access all I needed, but only on campus. What an inconvenience! Making my way onto campus at night to post blogs before the deadline and missing out on emails that I could only access when I got to class was not fun. It is possible to survive in a world without internet at home (and many people do), but it made me think about the thousands and thousands of South Africans who have absolutely no access to internet, and who do not have a University a couple hundred meters away where they can access internet. For them it is not simply an inconvenience, it is an impossibility.

I am beginning to warm up to this idea of digital pedagogy and technology in the classroom but extreme care must be taken to not exclude students in our classes. Currently in South Africa, I do not think it is possible to make the large shift to everything being digitalised. I do think however, possible social media aspects can be made voluntary in schools. Extra enhancers and add-ons can be implemented in classrooms, but to rely on the internet to communicate important information and changes to students is a mistake. Unknowingly, you could be excluding a student from participating and learning, purely because they do not have access to internet or even a computer.