Social Media and Adult Education

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Social Media and Assessment

Can teachers assess their students without stressing them unnecessarily? This week's article by Alonzo et al. (2023) answers this question positively. They contend that while assessment is a crucial part of learning, social media supports the dialogic aspect of assessment, such as giving feedback. This matters because from the point of view of Sociocultural Theory, feedback involves the student's agency and knowledge exchange, where the scaffolding, facilitated by feedback, supports the student as they move gradually toward a better understanding. Evidence suggests that social media gives students a sense of participation and ownership. Its interactive nature enables students to provide each other with feedback almost instantly. However, a significant challenge lies in the tendency of teachers and students to perceive social media as a source of entertainment rather than education. Even so, social media’s accessibility and ease of collaboration make it a highly valuable to...

Why Every Adult Education Teacher Needs a Professional Learning Network

IET (Integrated Education and Training) programs are relatively new and specific even within the context of adult education. For this reason, IET teachers might feel quite lonely within their field. To connect with like-minded teachers and to see if I could do it, I created two posts on LinkedIn. The first one missed the mark. The second one, discussing microlearning credentials in adult education, gained a little bit of traction. Perhaps it would have done better if I had used hashtags. In truth, not very many teachers have LinkedIn accounts, but I decided to build my Professional Learning Network and thought that it might work. I would like to connect my experience with the self-generating professional learning paradigm by Prestridge (2018). Months before I created my post I had been lurking on LinkedIn, observing what is out there and sometimes finding a useful resource in the field of TESOL. Clearly, I was an info-consumer who had to fulfill self-driven needs. Yet, I ...

Sifting Through the Noise: A Sceptic's Guide to ESOL Teacher Groups

While reading this week’s material, I was naturally drawn to explore Facebook. As an ESOL teacher, I have been looking for new ideas on the internet for years, but never much on social media. Here is a summary of my observations: Teaching English as a Second Language is somewhat specific. Most students will never need it, while it is crucial for those who do. Furthermore, in terms of social media, the concept of an ‘ESOL teacher’ can be as broad or as narrow as one chooses. For example, there are many ESOL teachers whose only qualification is the fact that they were brought up in an English-speaking country. Add to that the scores of passionate non-native teachers and you get a digital landscape that is incredibly varied. And so, because the barrier to entry in online spaces is so low, social media easily becomes flooded with spam and low-quality material. How does an ESOL teacher find a group to support their growth? On Facebook, there are over 50 different groups for ES...

Target Artifacts

As a student, I have a love-hate relationship with target artifacts. Sometimes, I am so focused on the task that I do not notice them. You may also think that I am busy and that would be true, too. Nevertheless, when I check target artifacts, I wonder: Can I make something that will be comparable to this? How can I make it mine? I have observed a similar attitude in my students' behavior. So far, I have been using weekend challenges to support my students' receptive skills, which are listening and reading, mainly by using YouTube videos. This week, I have a completely new kind of challenge, which will be focusing on knowledge application and creating a short presentation. Making a presentation is not a small feat for an intermediate language learner. It requires focus, attention, factual knowledge, the digital skills, the ability to resist the use of AI, AND restraint. How can they learn these skills the best? It seems that they could benefit from cooperative learning in small...

Classification of Social Media according to Social Media Toolkit

I was really excited while I was reading this week's article about the Social Media Toolkit because the article is a treasure-trove of ideas for the use of social media in instruction. Even though its original focus was oriented toward higher education, it is obvious that the Toolkit can be applied to other learning contexts, as well. First, the Framework for Social Media that the authors used helped me see the big picture behind the use of social media in the classroom. They focus on four main areas, or core functions: instructional methods, knowledge levels, content types, and assessment. Second, social media is categorized according to its purpose into six groups: social networking, media sharing, document sharing, live communication, collaboration, and blogging and microblogging. Third, the Decision Matrix is the outcome of the application of the Framework for Social Media to different categories of social media. The resulting Social Media Toolkit helps ins...