When it comes to schools using social media, there are two main areas of discussion, communication and education:

1. The first is that of communication; where social media is used as a tool for school administrators to communicate with parents, teachers, students and community members. In turn, these new online tools are also used as a way for parents, teachers, students and community members to voice their views and opinions back to school administrators and education officials.
2. The second area of discussion is that of education, where social media is taught and used in the classroom as a platform for sharing, learning, and growing.

The first area of concern (communication) is a no-brainer. Of course your school should be using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr to keep in touch and communicate with the people in your “tribe”. Social media sites such as these are a great tool for school officials to have. The tools are free, easy to use, can be run by a single person within your organization, and best of all – your parents, teachers and students are already using these services.

The second issue (that of education), however, is a little trickier. It’s trickier because while social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are fairly straightforward when it comes to giving and receiving information, things get a whole lot messier once you start giving students these exact same tools and expecting them to handle them the way adults do.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Discussing the use of social media tools as an education platform, or even as an entirely new subject matter, is an exciting concept. But the first step is to get our schools past the communication phase.

Let me repeat that: The first step is to communicate via social media… and then we can start talking about using these new tools as a platform for education.

My prediction is that over the next year or two, you will see hundreds, if not thousands, of schools take to social media websites like Facebook and Twitter as a means of communication between school administrators and the people in their immediate locale (i.e. parents, teachers, etc.).

The private schools will probably take to social media first, as they are smaller, filled with less bureaucracy, and can move a whole lot faster than the larger public institutions.

After the public schools have been thoroughly convinced that this social media stuff actually works, they’ll start to use to the tools as well, but they’ll be coming in late and playing a nasty game of catchup.

It’s only then, after both public and private schools have adopted these new tools, that we will begin to start seeing a large percentage of schools take to social media in the classroom.

But before any of that can happen, at least on a larger scale, the first step is going to be getting school administrators well versed when it comes to using these new online tools as a means for feedback, support and communication.

Photo by dalbera

To get a better idea of what today’s students lives are like, watch the video below:

Some interesting statements from the video above:

• 18% of teachers know their students names.
• Only 26% of the reading students are given is relevant to their lives.
• Students buy hundreds of dollars worth of textbooks that they never open.
• Most students read 8 books, 2300 web pages, and 1281 Facebook profiles in a single year.
• Students spend approximately 3.5 hours online each day and 2 hours a day on their cell phones.
• They are multi-taskers, because they have to be in order to get everything done.
• When today’s college students graduate, they will probably be working in jobs that don’t exist today.