Social Media Revolution and Educational Change Challenge

Recently, I have watched several educational videos which I think are useful for future teaching. And they also give me several inspirations about teaching. Next, I will show you my reflections to two videos which impressed me a lot.

After watching the video  Social Media Revolution 2011, I find that influence of social media on humans are enormous and I even can’t imagine that. At first, we need to answer a question: “what is social media?” Some people would say that social media is about business and others may say that social media is about relationship. Actually social media is about people. It even impacts our offline behavior. For example, 1 in 5 couples meet online and 3 in 5 gay couples meet online. Thus, social media influence not only our learning or searching behaviors but also our daily behaviors. In addition, at present, kindergartens are learning on ipads. In other words, social media influence all ages.

       We know some popular social media such as Youtube, Twitter, Facebook etc. If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third largest which is a very interesting data in the video. Furthermore, social media also includes advertisements which are also very influential. For instance, over 37 million people watched the VW Darth Vadar Super Bowl Ad.

       In terms of books, there are more and more e-books. According to the video, e-readers have surpassed traditional book sales. If Wikipedia were made into a book, it would be 2.25 million pages long and would take you over 123 years to read. According to the data, we can see that e books have helped us to save space and natural materials.

       The next video I have watched is Educational Change Challenge 2010, it has given me several inspirations on teaching. For instance, every student is not in the same place of math, English or other subjects even they are at the same age. This gives me an inspiration that every student is an individual who has their unique characteristics. This makes me remember Confucius who was a prestigious educator in ancient China. He said: “Students should be taught in accordance with their aptitude.” If we fail to consider this principle, then classroom would produce industrial mode of thinking.

       Nowadays, the students we are teaching or are going to teach are media-driven generation. Moreover, according to the video, teachers need to exist in the space where the students exist. Thus, if we don’t use technology for learning, we may lose relevance. An educator must be relevant. As students are closely connected to social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Blogs, why not use social media as a learning and teaching tool which would attract students’ interest and reduce dullness as much as possible.

       In conclusion, the two videos have shown us how powerful social media is and what teaching principles we need to update. Thus, in future teaching, what we need to do is to use social media as one of our teaching tools and update our teaching principles and exist where students exist.