NOW HIRING: SOCIAL MEDIA PROFESSIONALS

As the education arena looks to empower our youth with the necessary skills to find success now and in the future, the reality of a social media skill set becomes ever more important each day.  Now as a primary teacher this might all seem a little silly, or is it.  After all, I am using Scratch and Scratchjr to support early an early coding capacity, which also supports a great understanding of spatial sense in mathematics.  So why then, if social media skills are now being taught in university, would I not seek to empower my tiny tweeters and baby bloggers now?

While formulating the "social media skills to pay the bills," I had a few interesting revelations.

• Collaboration - The term social can refer to an interaction between the individuals and a group. Currently, there is a strong push to promote collaborative inquiry and discussion within the learning process.  Group work is becoming more and more a common practice, and thus the need to teach these interaction skills have too.  Interestingly, many of these social skills are the very foundation of developing a social media skill set.  While the physical presence may be removed, the necessity to promote active listening, mutual respect, positive sharing and a right to pass/participate transcends the physical into the digital

• Purpose and Main Idea - In literacy, we spend a great deal of time looking writing for purpose and drawing out the main idea of an article or story.  These skills take years to effectively develop and are integrated throughout the curriculum.  Given the confines of tools like Twitter or the necessity be concise in a headline, once again there appears a transference between the learning in the physical classroom and that of online collaboration.  According to Social Media Wunderkind Marc Guberti, "to effectively share a message one must use the main idea, that in itself will grab them to learn more."

• Assigning Importance - We have Math clubs, basketball practice, science tutoring, reading programs because we believe effective practice makes better and instills importance.  We track success of student growth and encourage the importance of studying.  If we make something vital to functioning effectively, then we invest ourselves in that thing to ensure success.  Committing to your class blog, twitter, student portfolio etc is no different than the sought results explained above.  This year a teach said, "I gave up on a class website because no one was going on it."  After discussing the importance they assigned to it for the student to find success, we quickly realized they were not consistently using it, the students had no investment in it and they did not commit to making it vital piece of their class.  If we model the importance of active social engagement in social media for success, then our students will inherently replicate this so as to be part of the collaboration.

While we need to teach online safety, I wonder how necessary it is to explicitly teach social media skills? Rather, are we not already doing this and these social skills are thus able to be reinforced through the integration of the electronic media?