Social Media in Our Classrooms

How the Selfie Project is Integrating Social Media into Education - Cadence Braughton

In my old elementary school, the kindergarten through third-grade kids have ipads and the fourth graders through sixth graders have MacBooks. This was not something I experienced when I was in kindergarten. Though now social media is such an important part of our lives they use it in elementary school classrooms. They also use social media in college classrooms. Social media has integrated into almost all aspects of our lives. It is important that the public understands whether this is a good part of the evolution of learning or should be stopped.

In upper-level classrooms, basic topics of study are being connected to social media. One example of this is a Selfie assignment from a college in Michigan. Professor Simone Sessolo “designed a class centered on practicing writing strategies via taking selfies.” The idea of this class is to be able to take topics from writing classes and connect them to visual images, in this case, selfies. One element of study talked about in this class is rhetorical analysis. This is when you consider all aspects of a text (in this case a picture) to understand what message is trying to be conveyed fully. This can be looking at the audience, context, purpose, and form of communication. The students in this class have to use their knowledge of this writing concept and others and connect them to pictures that people commonly post on social media sites. 

The main questions students in the class aim to answer are “What do we want to communicate when we take a selfie?” and “How does the act of communication affect the way we present ourselves to our communities?” These topics originate from writing classes. In writing classes, it can be easier to understand how you are presenting yourself when you are writing. It can be more difficult though, to understand how you are presenting yourself on social media when images are used instead of words. This class allows students to understand how an image can be presented online and different ways to convey different messages. 

An interesting fact about this class is that in Unit 1 “Situating the Selfie” all of the articles and papers the students look into and use as information tends to be from the 2010s. It can be very rare to find a class that is up-to-date on information and uses writings that are more modern. This feeds into the idea that this class is groundbreaking in modern teaching and using learning styles that pertain to the upcoming generations. This allows the students to gain a better understanding of what they are studying due to the professors using elements of the student’s everyday lives which allows for a deep and more meaningful grasp on the topics of study. 

The second unit of the class introduces the topic of presenting yourself and how you do that with a selfie. There are four categories that are used in the class that relates rhetorical discourse to character presentation. These categories are “good character, persuasion, identification, and discursive information. These topics are the basis of the final project of the class, in which students are required to take selfies of themselves to display a specific aspect of themselves that can be identified by the audience. 

Unit three, “Performing Personae” is all about peer review and workshops that allow the students to practice for their final assignment. The final assignment requires four selfies from a student that each shows a different rhetorical discourse. The students are able to use different types of presentation platforms for their final. Along with the four selfies, each picture needs a companion text to describe the selfie. This allows the students to revert back to their past writing classes and use a more basic basis of those common classes. 

The article at hand is very educational in its explanation of how this assignment relates to common writing topics that most people study during their journey with higher education. Though in this article we do not get any thoughts from the students who partake in the assignment. This would’ve been very helpful for other educators or parents advocating for their students who want more social media integration into the education of their students. This can be a red flag if feedback was left out due to it being negative. It can depend solely on your opinion if you believe this is a successful project or not. 

When a professor uses elements of life that their students can relate to, the students can get a more full understanding of the topics at hand. With social media, all of the upcoming generations have a very good understanding of how big a part it is in their life. If more teachers and professors connected their teachings to social media, it could possibly improve the comprehension rate while also improving the actions of people on social media. Learning styles are always adapting and changing to best fit the needs of the generations at hand. From this, you can decide if the integration of social media is what’s best, or worst for our education system. 

Reference 

Article written by Simone Sessolo explaining The Selfie Project http://thepromptjournal.com/index.php/prompt/article/view/23 Links to an external site.