If you can't beat them - JOIN them!

I am specializing in Curriculum Studies English and Life Orientation. This means that I will hopefully be given the opportunity to teach these subjects in a high school. Now I don't care about the community I will serve as a teacher. There is one thing I know all learners in the 21st century South Africa are exposed to or at least know of - Social Media. I plan to use social media in my classroom one day because I know about the benefits it can provide in the modern classroom. I am aware of the pitfalls too.

English (Home Language and First Additional Language)
Social Media is a great way to connect to your learners. In communities that are relatively poor buying the newspaper everyday is an expensive habit. Giving the learners the opportunity to access online newspapers by means of their smartphones or the school's computer room, they can start reading actively and I can create activities like orals about contemporary topics and I could ask them to print and read aloud an article that interested them. That way they share information and practice their listening, speaking and reading skills as required by the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). To improve writing learners can use Twitter to summarize paragraphs into the allowed 140 characters provided in a tweet. I can create a hashtag like we use in our PGCE course at Stellenbosch University to track the tweets my learners send. I would encourage them to read the blogs of other learners around the world and start one where they do reflections about what they learn in class and in other subjects. This way they can engage with others on a global scale. If I struggle to explain a concept or a rule in language to the learners I will look for a video on YouTube and stream it so that they might learn from someone else. I will ask of my learners to create a wall in the classroom where they put new words on that they read somewhere, each week we can take a few, look it up in a dictionary and thesaurus and then after they understand the word they can practice using it or synonyms thereof. This way they build their vocabulary. When it comes to literature, they can develop plays and perform it, other learners can record it and watch and share it later. To practice writing further I will take the learners to the computer room and ask them to write an e-mail with certain information and they should e-mail it to an account I will create for assessment purposes. If they have no access to electronics at the school I can print pages that look like websites, blogs and e-mails for them to fill in.  

Life Orientation
Life Orientation being a sensitive subject at times can benefit a lot from social media and outside sources. Learners can throw private questions into a box after each lesson that I will research and answer in general in the next lesson. I will condemn them messaging other people via the internet with issues relating to school work that I do not know about as this can be a threat to them. When a topic like HIV, sex or pregnancy is discussed in the class and I see the learners do not take it up well, I can ask them to animate with software a short video clip that show their understanding of the topic. This will spare shy learners the embarrassment of speaking in class and children who might deal with these issues their privacy. The world of work is a mystery to most learners, by giving them the opportunity to brows university websites and by giving them year books of the universities they can see what marks they have to obtain to be accepted into a certain course after grade 12. Giving them case studies about certain topics and giving them questions to do can give me insight to their understanding of what we do in class and gives me the freedom and ability to adapt my lesson plans because I know where my learners are. Online is a great place to find the rules to different sports and ideas for developing games that they can use to obtain their physical education marks.

There are so many great ways to use the internet and social media in the classroom. The dangers of allowing your kids online is scary, but if you can control it, why not use it to give your learners a new and interesting way of looking at boring subjects like English and Life Orientation. These are two of the four subjects learners in South Africa need to pass every year in order to finish school. After 12 years they can become bored of the same old story. Do yourself a favor by not turning your classroom into the "off-period" and make them want to learn again. If you can't beat them - JOIN them.