Social Media Challenge

Yunlu Zhang

Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

CTL1617: Social Media and Education

Dr. Dania Wattar

 Social Media Challenge

This reflection is centered on my experience operating a professional Instagram

account as a social media challenge. My reflection will focus on three parts according to my

experience: 1)What types of posts do I find the most helpful, 2) What I learned from this

experience, and 3) What issues I encountered when establishing my professional profile.

What types of posts do I find the most helpful?

Social media provides educators with frequent, immediate, conversational, and

personal interactions and feedback(Carpenter & Krutka, 2015, as cited in Asim et al., 2020).

To better take advantage of social media, educators should carefully evaluate and practice the

use of social media in professional development (PD), as it would bring innovation to this

field. Through social media, PD is no longer limited by time and space, and it can happen at

any time. The very innovative and specific merit is reflected in social media's ability to help

educators build connections, share pedagogical techniques and resources, and eventually

meet in person at a professional conference(Asim et al., 2020). The most useful Instagram

posts I've discovered are those that offer advice on who to follow as well as links to online

resources (RO) and useful resources (RR). Both RO and RR are critical parts of resources

exchange and building community; because on social media, teachers can obtain innovative

classroom ideas as well as insider information on how to most effectively execute proposed

techniques because they believe that other teachers have vetted the best new strategies and

practices(Greenhow et al.,2019). I would like to introduce the post that I found from

@olivias.classroom (Figure 1) as an example of a reference for helpful resources. In Olivia's

post, she was suggesting an effective and creative strategy to help students develop their

analytical skills through activating hexagonal thinking by relating, comparing, and

contrasting ideas. I find this activity very impressive and intriguing as, by doing the how-to

activity, students will be engaged in writing down big ideas in each hexagon and connecting

them with related big ideas, and Olivia has shared her own teaching experience in Grade 9

English class that utilized this strategy. I think it is a very valuable suggestion because in the

real case, such a strategy turned out to show that “students worked in small groups to draw

connections between a novel and a poem that share similar themes” and “students were

actively engaged throughout the lesson”. I personally would take this advice and try to

implement it if possible in my future teaching, especially dealing with small group

collaborative learning that requires discussion and brainstorming.

(Figure 1)

From another post by @ms.melos.classroom(Figure 2), I found a post offering advice

and recommendations on Instagram profiles to follow in the field of education. With a very

appealing image of Instagram accounts to follow, Melo elaborates her recommendation by

tagging each profile with a detailed description of the features, whether they are owned by

individuals or organizations, and what information and assistance they can bring to educators.

I was deeply inspired by the idea of sharing useful information and building a supportive

community on such a platform, and the situation that educators could utilize social media to

meet social and emotional needs(Greenhow et al.,2019) Therefore, I made my own resource
exchange post after a period of exploring #PLN as well as other related hashtags with a

deliberately- designed image. By doing so, I have received several comments from the

account holders expressing their thanks and kindness to me, which made me so impressed

and satisfied. Their response gave me both socially and emotionally connections that

motivate me to participate in professional learning networking through Instagram as a

learning platform.

(Figure 2)

What I learned from this experience?

Research on the use of social media for training teachers all came to the conclusion

that social media enhanced teachers' professional development(Van Den Beemt et al.,2020).

In terms of teachers’ professional development by means of social media, Gleason(2016) has

pointed out that social media in education contributes to resource exchange, community

building, and individual needs. According to my experience with the social media challenge,
the biggest takeaway from the challenge is related to resource exchange. Thanks to Instagram

which has exclusive photo, videos, and story-sharing features compared to other social media

platforms(Erarslan, 2019), I had found plenty of visually appealing images and videos filled

with helpful resources. Through #PLN I was able to take the initiative to discover more

innovative strategies and instructional activities. I noticed that each account serves a

particular purpose, as evidenced by the post that the holders have previously shared. The

portfolio-like appearance helps me decide what I want to look at because the content of the

images is both obvious and compelling. This enlightened me about how to make an

outstanding account profile that would better exchange useful ideas. Meanwhile, I also felt a

sense of closeness by tagging #CTL1617 as I know that there is a particular community that I

could contribute to, build up connections with, and share information within, which

encourages me to engage in discussion and professional learning networking. I also feel my

personal need is satisfied, as I had options on which types of posts I want to create and reflect

on.

What issues I encountered when establishing my professional profile?

The first issue I encountered when establishing my professional profile on Instagram

is that as image focus-oriented platform, users on Instagram tend to express their support by

“like” the posts(Limniou, 2021), and I have waited for days to receive a “like” and comment.

While my followers kept increasing since the day I created my professional account and share

posts, I barely received an immediate response as I expected. Unlike Facebook and Twitter,

Instagram does not have the function to retweet and build on the original post, I don’t think it

is relatively friendly to restate and give additional knowledge on others’ posts. In addition, I

was also concerned about the credibility and authenticity of the professional accounts (both

for my followings and followers), as I had no idea whether they are the real presence or just

fake/zombie account profiles. As Figure 3 shows, there are groups of people who followed
me for a few days and each of them has a different identity. But how could I know if it is

real? No organization or community can endorse each other's identity.

(Figure 3)
 Reference

Asim, S., Poyo, S. & Fecich, S. (2020). It’s about how to pivot: Teacher educators, teacher
candidates and Twitter. In R. E. Ferdig, E. Baumgartner, R. Hartshorne, R.
Kaplan-Rakowski & C. Mouza (Eds.) Teaching, Technology, and Teacher Education
during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Stories from the Field (pp. 279- 287).
AACE-Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.
https://www.learntechlib.org/p/216903/
Gleason, B. (2016). New Literacies Practices of Teenage Twitter Users. Learning, Media and
Technology 41(1), 31–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2015.1064955
Greenhow, C., Galvin, S. M., & Staudt Willet, K. B. (2019). What Should Be the Role of
Social Media in Education? Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
6(2), 178–185. https://doi.org/10.1177/2372732219865290
Van Den Beemt, A., Thurlings, M., & Willems, M. (2020) Towards an understanding of
social media use in the classroom: a literature review. Technology, Pedagogy and
Education, 29(1), 35-55. http://doi.org/10.1080/1475939X.2019.1695657
Limniou, M., Ascroft, Y. & McLean, S. Differences between Facebook and Instagram Usage
in Regard to Problematic Use and Well-Being. J. technol. behav. sci. (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41347-021-00229-z