Social networks are increasingly occupying the days of young students. From chats to photo sharing and video sharing, everything has become possible with its social platforms. Many parents are anxious to see their children addicted to social networks despite their disastrous school results.
How Social Media Affects Students?
On the other hand, new European research shows that the use of social platforms would have a small impact on the school result. Several contradictory analyses have already been conducted on this subject. Nevertheless, this complicated the real appreciation of the overall results in the past. Some research shows that social networks have a detrimental effect on school performance. Others have a positive impact, while others find no connection.
Consequences of Social Networks: A New, More Through Investigation
In this new, more in-depth survey, researchers focused on students who use social networks fluently. Discussions with friends on topics related to studies. They thus deduced that the latter obtained above-average scores.
According to them, it was easy to guess. They also noticed that students who are more active on social media also spend more time learning. On the one hand, students who use these platforms too often to send messages and share photos have poor results.
Using social media is the same in class or doing homework. In the end, they had less good results. It is so obvious that texting while studying does not promote concentration. The first question that arises is whether the consequences of social networks would be the reduction of results. (Topic Contd.: How Social Media Affects Students?)
The second is to determine if students who already had poor grades would be easily diverted by the platforms. However, it was difficult to answer these questions. In addition, there is the possibility of two paths of cause and effect.
Student Sourcing Through Social Networks
If there is a platform favoured by both consumers and professionals, it is social networks. These have become the ground where meeting with customers is possible. To use them in student sourcing, however, it is necessary to adopt good practices.
Knowing how to communicate with your targets is important: you should know that for a student, the choice of an institution is very thoughtful. In this sense, it is important to know how to “sell” with the right strategies.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, so many media that have become very present in the daily lives of all. They are used by students of all ages, for different reasons, but mainly for communication in all its forms. The enthusiasm for these media, however, represents a real opportunity to find customers for a company and it is no less for training institutions.
The use of these social media is, in the first place, a way to get closer to its targets. It is obvious that to attract them, it is necessary to ensure good visibility of offers from them. With students almost all equipped with a smartphone, it is essential to appear on these social networks to find the best talent for its establishment. (Topic Contd.: How Social Media Affects Students?)
The use of social networks is also a new way of recruiting students. They make it possible to interact continuously with the students in order to better orient them, and give the possibility to form a relationship with them and to accompany them in their decision-making process.
What you need to know is that these students have personal and professional goals that they seek to achieve. They are therefore looking for guidance, information and advice on which institution and which course they used to achieve these goals.
Accompanying them and helping them to make their choice is in this case necessary, hence the interest of the contents that are proposed to them.
These contents can provide information on the training offers available, the content of the training, the curriculum, or the opportunities available with the training in question. In all cases, these contents can feed these students and help them in their reflection.
How Teachers can use Social Media to Optimize Students’ Results?
The teachers should always think about the use of social media from a pedagogical perspective, integrating them from the beginning in the design of their course and in the student evaluation but never try to apply a ready-made method. Instead, teachers will need to gain experience of collaborative learning in social media through experience and bring students as close as possible to their own level.
The method will therefore change with the degree of learning of the teacher and will have to take into account the know-how of the students, the disciplinary, social context, etc. The teacher’s personal learning path plays a vital role in the form and quality of his teaching.
The use of content creation platforms is used to teach students how to choose categories or “tags” to classify useful information in a long-term memory, so that they can be easily retrieved later. (Topic Contd.: How Social Media Affects Students?)
This skill will serve them well in the rest of their careers. The blogs are used as carriers of “final task” for graduate courses and as research notebooks for Master or PhD students: notes on the readings, formulation of hypotheses, data accumulation, first version of scientific articles or chapters of dissertations or theses, etc.
The public research notebook facilitates the relationship with the supervisor and allows for the timely reorientation of risky research directions, contacting teams working on the same subjects, and so on.
The Facebook groups are used to share the Syllabus or “lesson plan”, the class diary, the required readings, the internal group discussions – for example those concerning the evaluation – as well as the students’ email addresses (Twitter, blog social healing platform, etc.).
All this information is online and accessible with one click, including required readings. Students can participate in the writing of mini-wikis within the Facebook group on topics of their choice; they are invited to suggest interesting related reading about the course by adding commented links.
On Twitter, the conversation specific to each class is identified by a hashtag. At first, teacher can use the medium to the blue bird punctually. For example, at the end of each class he can ask the students to write down the most interesting idea they had learned from the class and scroll through their tweets in real time on the classroom screen. (Topic Contd.: How Social Media Affects Students?)
Then, after a few weeks, invited them to reread their collective traces on Twitter to gather and summarize what they had learned and ask questions – always on Twitter – if something was not cleared, teacher can answer by the same channel
How Social Media Affects Students?
- How Social Media affect Students’ Academic Results? - September 13, 2018