Social networks for lifelong learning – learning launch tool

Challenge   I am an educator in teacher education domain. In educational technology courses, we  teach student teacher how to effectively integrate technology in classrooms.  However, my collages and I found problem that is the nature of learning technologies  are continuously updating and it was hard to cover them. In addition, the field of  learning technology always requires new skills for teachers during this career.

So, my academic department (educational technology) in my collage decided to  conduct a project aim to adopt teaching strategies that help students to be lifelong  learners about learning technologies -skills and apps.

Selection   We used design thinking tools and techniques (mapping the learning resources for our  academics and expert interviews) to come up with assumption that integrating social  networks (like Twitter) in teaching could help our student teachers to move from  formal learning to informal learning and expand their learning resource. We were not  sure how our students would accept the new strategy in learning and how they would  act upon this change and weather they will continue to engage in the social networks  to expand their knowledge about learning technologies tools and apps. Therefore, we  used learning launch to examine our assumption.

Application   To test our assumption and the strategies, we identified exactly the guideline of the  teaching strategy for integrating social networks in teaching and learning. Specifically,  we provide the tasks that the lecturer could do with the student teacher depend on  the platform. We created three launches for the platforms that is Twitter, WhatsApp  and Instagram. Three of our team as lecturers volunteered to use these strategies with  their students. An example of the tasks was to tweet in a hashtag about each week  topics and share learning resources. Then the team examined the experiment result  by the design criteria which resulted from the first stage from the design thinking  (what is?) and one of the criteria is to see whether the students continue to use the  social networks even after the course was finished. so, we did content analysis and  then we did interviews with the students to understand their motivations and feeling  about the experiments.

Insight  Although we fail to meet our criteria in WhatsApp and Instagram launch, We found in  twitter launch that many students continue to participate even the course finished.  The results from the deep interviews indicate that many of students told us that they  was not interesting at the beginning but teacher's interactions motivated them such  as retweets and likes, then they told us that many experts in the field saw their  participations in hashtags regarding learning technologies and they follow them, so

they felt as a member in the community and they felt responsible to share learning  resources with them.

Therefore, this launch experience gave us new dimension that is the role of teachers  and community to motivate students for continues learning. Secondly, the nature of  social networks should be in our consideration for integrating them in teaching and  learning because in our context WhatsApp and Instagram are considered more  personal for students.

Approach  we put one of our priority in the department is to engage students in educational  technology communities and create our own presenting our college.

One of approaches we will do we will invite students with our team to design the tasks  of integrating social networks in teaching educational technologies in other learning  launch.

