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Personally, I haven’t created a YouTube channel to reach students through a different medium, however, I have used YouTube videos to support my lesson or student learning in my class. I think creating a YouTube channel in which you are providing students a different input of information, will be awesome! Especially because most students today, use YouTube to watch videos and stream. This idea will definitely engage students in their  learning and provide access to content outside of the classroom. 

Hi Ryan! I am currently a Junior at the University of Northern Iowa. This is something that I have thought about quite a bit during my time as a student. I have had classes in college where my professors have used social media as a learning tool and honestly it has worked out pretty nicely. However, I think that it depends on the ages of the students that you are working with. If you were to have, say, middle school students learn on Twitter, my fear is that they would be more focused on their personal matters on twitter instead of using it as a learning tool. I think that Youtube can be a great resource for teaching, especially because it helps students to go back and review certains topics or areas and gives them a chance to listen to it more than once in case they don't understand it the first time. I think that this will also keep their attention, but it has to be kind of fun. My fear with Youtube is that it isn't interactive enough, so if you don't make your video pretty short, or you don't make it exciting, the students might lose focus on it or skip through it. I think this method can work if you do it the right way. I would definitely encourage you to try it and see how it goes with your students! :)

Hi Ryan, although I am only a preservice teacher, I feel I can provide tips from the student perspective. You are right, social media is a tool that us students use often & are very familiar with. Depending on the grade level, I know some teachers enforce the use of social media to collect data over a topic, or something similar. I think YouTube can be a great option to use while interacting and teaching students. There is so much that can be uploaded to YouTube, and if a student were to miss a class day, they can view a video on what they had missed that day.

I always thought this would be a good idea. Sometimes when students go home, they forget how to do their homework. Me as the teacher, I could post videos on youtube explaining how to do their homework as a reference for them, Kids nowadays are always on social media anyhow.

Hello,

I'm currently in the Teacher Preperation Program and in my opinion, the Professors that use social media in their classrooms have great comminucation skills with the students. It engages the students to learn and resources are always available if they need to look over the content material again. YouTube, is an excellent choice as every student knows what it is and can be used as an informational tool whenever they're trying to learn something new. Canva is also great tool for students since it gives them the ability to be creative. Overall, I do think it's important to implent some form of social media for educational purposes. 

Hi Ryan,

I think if social media is used constructively, it is a great tool for learning. To ensure that your students are guided to learning through any social channels try this class experiment. 

Step1: ask students to take their phones out and go to their social media app of their choice (it can be anything YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, snapchat etc.)

Step 2: Time them for 2 mins

Step 3: At the end of 2 mins ask them to stop and put their phones back in their backpacks.

Step 4: Introduce yout topic for that day and start your regular teaching activity 

step 5: Give them a word for e.g if I was teaching photosynthesis, I would give them the term chlorophyll 

step 6: after the teaching is done, ask them to take their phones out again and research on the given term in their social media handles (they can choose which app they want to use)

step 7: Time for 2 mins

Step 8: At the end of the 2 mins, ask them to put their phone away and hand out a sheet with 3 simple questions

1) did you use the same social media handle both times: yes/no. name them _______

2) do you think using social media helped learn something new about chlorophyll? ye/no

3) will you use social media to research today's topic or any other homework? yes/no

Graph the data and present to your students next time if you should or should not use social media in that particular class. 

Thank you for posting this list of resources!