How is Social Media Changing the Education System?

                                                     

Social Media has become an norm as the years go by. It is now more crazy to be seen without any social media. With apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok becoming more popular after COVID, social media is taking the world by storm. Social Media helps the world connect from all over the globe. 

This is stated in Rheingold's book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Part of this book goes into detail about how using media can actually help us. It goes in detail on how people can use social media wisely. This hit a lot for me since before people knew a lot about social media, the dangers for it were everywhere. Now, we have people and things in place to not only protect children but protect each other.

When it comes to social media, whether people like it or not, it has taken over our world. With that being said, there are positives and negatives when it comes to social media. Some positives would include how much easier it is to spread information. According to Barbus, social media helps to increase use of social media (2020). This means by spreading and sharing videos and posts, health information was able to help a lot more people than just being published in a journal. The same, however, can be said about the negative. Social media during COVID times, caused a lot of false information to be spread throughout the world. 

While reading this, I realized just how much social media and technology has changed. In schools, Chromebooks are used everyday.  New Box-lights are being installed. Our world is shifting to mainly technology as each day passes. While some argue its for the best, others say it is slowly ruining how children learn. On most days, teachers use between 5-10 worksheets a day. When you multiple that by the amount of students they have, its about 300 sheets of paper PER day. Using Chromebooks allows for the paper shortage in schools to slowly decrease. 

This is teaching me how everything is become digital as the day goes by. I used to be taught how to type on a computer. We are now reaching the days where knowing how to type is becoming more and more relevant in society, yet many do not know how to accomplish it. This means bringing back classes that taught just how to to use a computer but at a smaller scale.

Adding more lessons into the classroom on how to use a computer, will help students to understand that there are good and bad to everything. I am a firm believer of using technology. This is because it is used in everyone's daily lives. Teaching children when they are younger that in order to have social media they have to follow rules, will help to eliminate a lot of the problem that usually occur when children first use it. Technology is changing our lives day by day. It is up to us to keep up.

What are some ways in your day to day life that technology or social media has changed?

Bardus, M., El Rassi, R., Chahrour, M., Akl, E. W., Raslan, A. S., Meho, L. I., & Akl, E. A. (2020). The use of social media to increase the impact of health research: systematic review. Journal of medical Internet research, 22(7), e15607.