Social Media and the Impact on Education Social Media and Home Education

Magda CHELLY CEO, WinAkademy

WinAkademy Soutien Scolaire Paris, France

infos@winakademy.com / http://www.winakademy.com

Hana MATAILLET Commercial Department, WinAkademy

WinAkademy Soutien Scolaire Paris, France

infos@winakademy.com / http://www.winakademy.com

Abstract—This document describes the impact of the social media on education and home schooling or tutoring. The new technologies are used by children every day for different purposes. We tried to analyze the use of these new technologies through social media in educational organizations.

Keywords—tutoring, education, social media, teaching, new technologies

I. INTRODUCTION The education field has gone through significant changes

over the past few years. With the developments in technology, that have helped to design better and more advanced learning tools, new subjects have been added to the educational programs and teaching methods have evolved.

The 21st century has become a digital world that has borne digital natives. These children have never lived without a computer and spend hours online looking for information, creating or sharing it.

Nowadays, web environment offers limitless virtual opportunities through the use of social networks.

Those social networks or social media are becoming more and more influent and widely spread. In fact they are the new tools of the digital generation. They affect a very large public composed of children, teenagers and adults, and give opportunities to better communicate in a community and to create close links with people around the world.

The objective of this paper is to show how social media has impacted the education of our children and how it could be integrated for education purposes.

The leitmotiv is based on the existing popularity of these social media and their integration into educational organizations for learning purposes.

The structure of the paper is as follows. First, it will present an overview on how social media has gained momentum in today’s world and educational system and how children have used these networks to communicate better. Secondly, this paper will present how social media has been integrated into

schools, colleges and secondary schools and the positive impact it has had on children’s lives.

II. SOCIAL MEDIA The past decade has seen the rise of social media, with the

current dominance of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, the last one being the second largest search engine in the world.

What is exactly social media and how it is used?

Social media networks are interactive and collective tools on the web that give people the opportunity to create, share and publish information, build communities and communicate around the world.

As Social Media has become a viable marketing and customer service channel, many organizations are looking to quantify and understand the impact of their overall marketing investment of their business in the industry.

Quantifying the impact of social media includes multiple variables and companies or organizations often fail to understand and value their efforts properly in terms of the potential long-term business benefits of this type of channel. The companies cannot seem to see the profits generated by the integration of social media into their commercial and marketing strategy.

What about education and educational organizations?

As a matter of fact, the impact of social media is not limited to industries; education has also been influenced by the social media communities. Actually, the movement of social networking has already taken place in general education and is looking to leverage the potential of social networking for educational purposes.

The use of this new channel to communicate has helped children, teenagers and adults to grow and be completely integrated into the new digital world.

Although it can be harmful to children in the way that they can lose focus on school and can reduce their academic performance, it can also be beneficial for teachers and for children and become a learning environment, only if it is used

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responsibly and correctly, under the monitoring of parents for young kids.

Educational organizations that implement systems in order to connect and inform the various actors of Education have not yet quantified the impact of the social media on educational purposes [1].

III. SOCIAL MEDIA AND EDUCATION Understanding the impact of social media on the

educational system is very complex and requires multiple variables.

With the ever-growing amount of information being found and produced on the web, through blogging sites to social networking sites and now niche social media, children are now largely immersed into a digital world.

99% of children are behind their computers participating to any online activity while only 10% participate in class. A change in education is clearly needed and has actually well started; educators are no longer the main source of knowledge, Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, all those websites offer endless resources for students. However, we need to teach the students how to effectively use these resources.

The 21st century learning skills have changed in many ways. We could define them by the level of collaboration kids and teenagers have with each others, associates and specialists globally, and the connectivity, in other terms how fast they connect to resources by using broadband access. Connectivity and collaboration are two main capacities that give a brand new set of skills that are updating the reference by which we are measuring scholar attainments, student standards and student learning capacity. Thus, it is important to change the way of teaching and the way students learn.

How can social media be used in education without affecting the students negatively?

The objective is to use those networks to connect with other classrooms, globally communicate with students or educational actors, and enrich the lives of students by bringing interest, excitement and learning experiences.

Our research shows the importance of the implementation of social media platforms, as the future best ways to involve children and teenagers in learning and knowledge, and to have a wide open vision of the world.

The benefits that can be drawn from the use of social networks are the development of creative skills, and the opportunity for students and kids to be leaders in education and empower them to grow as digital and global citizens.

The barriers that are encountered when trying to integrate technology into classrooms or with educational actors appear with either with privacy issues, from the lack of knowledge from actors of the education world, or with people against change.

In order to be efficient, social networks needs to be used as functional tools and critical resources in an academic way.

These media give the ability to rapidly connect with students and highly influence them. Therefore this new communication channel affects the educational system. Moods, comments and recommendations can be shared and advices and expertise provided.

For a new innovative educational organization, it’s important to enlarge its perspective and try to incorporate social media into the organization’s strategy.

Many organizations use the Facebook platform to quantify social spinoffs of a new service or new project, by estimating the number of “Like”, for example. This number is becoming a real social indicator and could give a precise product or service performance.

The impact of social media indicators cannot be neglected. As noted previously, those are important as they help drive product sales or a new service performance. In education, they could show the importance of the students’ interests in different educational topics, for example.

Education organizations must be aware of this important channel and should take it into account in their communication strategy in order to have a major impact on their pupils and students.

IV. SOCIAL MEDIA AND EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS The template is designed so that author affiliations are not

repeated each time for multiple authors of the same affiliation. Please keep your affiliations as succinct as possible (for example, do not differentiate among departments of the same organization). This template was designed for two affiliations.

With the growth in Internet usage, coupled with the continuing scope of Wi-Fi, we are observing a real facility to connect to the social media at any time and in many locations, with any device. In fact, the availability of wireless could not be more than helpful to the social media connection, as well as the new-generation terminals that modify the access to Internet (smartphones, Android tablets, etc.) [2].

As we can see from the graph below, Figure 1, since 1997, the percentage of Internet connection in educational institutions is growing to reach a 100% use at colleges and secondary schools in 2004.

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Figure 1. The evolution of Internet Connection in French Educational Institutions, Source : http://www.senat.fr

We can then conclude that Internet connection is widely available for all pupils and students.

Technology is infused, especially in developed countries, where all students have laptop, and have labs available to work on. (These devices are usually provided by various foundations).

The students can then reach each other via social networks, creating groups on Facebook for example and exchanging information about academic work. [1][2] Actually, Facebook has already integrated a networking session where students can join their school network and discuss.

Educational videos exist on Youtube or Vimeo : a way to learn while having fun.

Of course, there has to be a limit to the use of these social networks, so that children don’t fall into a “virtual world” and it always have to remain for education purposes and help the children in a constructive way.

Social media could also involve the educational actors such as teachers and tutors, and it could be very helpful and productive to have them using those networks in a constructive way. Teachers need resources and support. Professional learning communities are now different: they have changed from on-site into professional learning network online.

With this goal in mind, we elaborated a new online community for pedagogical purposes. This community allows all the actors to share information with each other and it is a free platform with pedagogical approaches.

Figure 2. The pedagogical community, Source : http://la-pedagogie.com

The image 2 shows the first page of the free pedagogical online community dedicated to educational actors.

The purposes of this community are to build a real exchange between experimented teachers and un-experimented ones and allow every educational actor to speak about their pedagogical methods and techniques.

V. SOCIAL MEDIA IN SCHOOLS When schools organize a big project or activities, for

example, or when they want to put news and information, they can add it on their Youtube account, Twitter account, Facebook account.

Schools, students or teachers have created groups and can collaborate with other groups in different schools, through social bookmarking sites , or other social networks, and hash tag the school name or group for example.

Social networking brings such a positive impact on children and school: a lot of resources, many connections, people, and experiences.

There is no time wasted if it is used efficiently, the time is only used differently.

For example, Skype is being used in schools to communicate across countries, help to share and exchange aspects of different cultures, and communicate with new friends in new places.

School directors or directors of programs should inform the parents about interesting people to follow or add for their kids account, such as authors, or artists.

Social networks also help to orientate the kids in their future career and learn about different types of jobs in different fields. They can learn about a lot of fields than can educate them, such as Youtube showing news or up-to-date videos.

Of course the enthusiasm may be impaired a little bit, and we cannot expect success every time, because children are interested to chat and have fun, but if school and teachers give them a real project to be excited about, and set up objectives, it can work.

We are wondering what are the criteria needed to build such efficient tools ?

Our researches lead us to the conclusion that the success of a social media is based on these parameters:

• Simplicity

• Ergonomy

• Interactions

• Media : Images and Videos

• Personalization

• Buzz

Children need to be attracted by a community platform that looks like the one they are usually using but with educational information and applications.

The research also reveals that the impact of a social media depends on how many followers can be reached through this media.

Many publishers of "social platforms" enable industrial companies to build a community spaces with collaborative measures to support innovation and participatory support (forum, opinions, votes, share ideas, news feed, members scoring, answers certification, etc).

These solutions could be adapted to the educational companies and offer a real rich cooperative space.

In fact, many schools or colleges have already created a “virtual campus” where students connect and get their courses and grades, can get information on teachers, can chat with their classmates and submit their homework.

In elementary schools, those social networks need to be monitored by parents, and strict rules need to be established.

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More schools should get involved and build social networking websites, collaborate with other universities or schools and create a large network through which students can study, research, as well as socialize with each other.

In terms of getting pupils and students to show an interest, social media can prove to be an excellent tool.

It can also allow students the opportunity and the means to interact with one another in a more collaborative way[3].

VI. GOING FURTHER

A. Listening and Answering One of the objectives of these social networking platforms

is to allow the educational company to measure its presence on social media, analyze the nature of the conversations and the feeling of Internet users. Teachers could analyze the students’ needs by analyzing their conversation and their answers on the forum.

The objective is for educational institutions to define a strategy and define the transmitted values on the community.

It is a good way to provide advice, create a connection between teachers and students and share recommendation, information.

B. Taking part in conversation As we said before, it is very important to have interactions

in social networks to allow it to work well and have a growing reputation. The more users or followers exist, the better it is. In fact, there should be a member of the educational actors that will supervise the community and interact with teachers and students.

A person, such as Community Managers in companies, could be present to interact with the community members to answer question. The goal is to help schools and institutions to better know the real needs of students and parents, and difficulties they may encounter.

Also, it’s good and beneficial for the school to connect with pupils or students and see them excited about a topic and learn something new.

In terms of profit, these interactions are necessary and give the social media more power.

When we look at the popular social media, we can see more “freedom of speech” when people talk. We could relate it to the school community, however we should be very attentive of the impact of this freedom and this is why values of the school are so important. [3]

VII. CONCLUSION AND PERSPECTIVES The objective is for educational institutions to define a

strategy and define the transmitted values on the community. Our research is based on an approach that takes into consideration the development of the social media in the industrial world and the educational institutions.

Results acquainted are promising and let us think of innovative methods for communicating amongst educational actors.

In addition, using social media as a means to further education is a great way to get children involved and to help them interact. It brings them excitement and interest about learning and transmitting information.

The rise of social media will gradually lead to a disruption of the functioning mode of educational institutions, if the "visibility" of this phenomenon and the "multiplication of points of contact" primarily affect the student-teacher relationship models, it will actually lead most schools to thoroughly review their strategy by implementing more Information and Communication Technology and social media.

The main goal of this paper is to show the importance of implementing social media in the daily school life [4].

REFERENCES [1] Kriek, L., “Mobile social media for a private higher education institution

in South Africa”, 2011 3rd Symposium on Web Society (SWS), 26-28 Oct. 2011, South Africa.

[2] Magda Chelly, Adel Ghazel, Riadh Tebourbi, Nel Samama, “WiFi Hybridisation with Pseudolites and Repeaters for Indoor Positioning Purposes”, ENC-GNSS 2008, Toulouse, Mai 2008, France.

[3] Silius, K., “Evaluating the quality of social media in an educational context”, 2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), 4-6 April 2011, Amman, Jordan.

[4] Van Meter Community School Librarian Shannon McClintock Miller, “Positive Effects of Social Media in Education”, New Leaf and Learning Conference, (YouTube), June 1 2011, United States.

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