While
Colleges and Universities have a key role in promoting high quality and
reliable education and the development of knowledge, with the fast growing
technology, media and information systems, it is obviously becoming very
difficult to cope with the needs of today’s students by confining education
only in educational institutions. Being overwhelmed by the information created
by virtual communities, a number of students are losing interest to learn in
colleges. This is a good signal to educators for the need to extend their
classrooms not only beyond the four walls but also beyond the campus compound.
The loss of students’ interest in colleges is
becoming a global issue. For instance it’s been widely reported that America is
facing an education crisis. Funding cuts, overcrowded classrooms and a shortage
of teachers impact this even further. But the main issue is that classrooms are
not social in nature.
To
positively affect education and learning, educators and administrators are
using social in many forms. Lesson plans and projects that worked 30 years ago
are being rethought, taking into account a different and more connected
audience of students today. Understanding the way digital content can help
students in the classroom, and how students are using it to learn, is at the
heart of fostering a new style of education.
Eritrea
Institute of Technology is extensively working to develop forward-thinking
educators by integrating social Media Technologies and Social Groups. Here are
few innovative ways
our educators need to adopt the power of social to empower students to succeed:
1. Transform Passive One-Way Teaching to Two-Way Collaboration
Education
is more than simply absorbing information. It’s about asking questions,
challenging the status quo, and empowering students to make informed decisions
and draw conclusions. Social platforms are tools to support the learning
ecosystem; it’s a technology that turns a one-way dialogue into multi-point conversations,
facilitating actionable collaboration.
As
computers and technology have become more and more prevalent, Instructors, has to seek ways to use Social technology to engage and
excite their students. Taking the concept of social networking and applying it
to an online community for students is one way of creating an academic
repository of their online work. Not only is it a place for the teacher to post
homework assignments and syllabi, the community becomes a destination for
students to share their viewpoints and grow with one another.
MyCampus,
a collaborative learning management system in the EIT network is deployed with
this in mind. With students knowing how to communicate well and having blogging
and writing skills, the teaching-learning process no longer ends at 6 pm; there
will be a constant flow of educational communication inside and out of the
classroom. The availability of social network technologies and social groups
being integrated with the learning platform enable students to stay connected
and collaboratively learn from each other. This transforms the one-way teaching
to network of collaboration.
2. Empowering Teachers to Make Curriculum Relevant for Tomorrow
To
help students succeed, our curriculum must be relevant for tomorrow. Students
need to be prepared for life beyond the academic setting and ready to embrace
post-graduate and working lives. To create a curriculum that’s truly
forward-looking, teachers need to have the time and space to do research, get
inspirations, and share best practices.
One
of the biggest benefits of a custom social community is that teachers who share
the same passion can easily connect in an open and supportive environment.
Conversations and idea sharing extend beyond the boundaries of classroom four
walls. At MyCampus we are seeing educators connecting with each other, in turn
finding the right recipe for integrating new technologies in classroom
teaching. A great example is the use of Forums (discussion topics) with in a
particular course and the ability to create social groups that foster institute
wide collaboration. Teachers are obliged to work on how this technology can
best be used to enrich the lives of students, while preparing them for
tomorrow. Teachers do this through the use of Institute wide discussion forums
at EitCloud, offering and getting tips and best practices, and detailing implementation
plans to centerpiece social classrooms to ready students for success today and
in the future.
Education is no longer passive, and that
students and teachers alike need to be flexible to relearn, at any time. His
community is taking advantage of the opportunity for educators to help out each
other by sharing ways to use mobile technology in the classroom to drive
student success.
3. Build a Support and Professional Development System for Teachers
As
education reform develops into a twenty-first century curriculum, teachers and
school administrators are coming together as members of online communities to
nurture a professional support system. By joining the conversation through
education-focused EIT communities, teachers are no longer making the education
journey solo in other words no learner is an island.
EitCloud-Collaborative Educational Community is one such community, attracting an institute wide
teaching-learning audience with global education reform vision. There,
educators become part of the digital dialog, enabling them to share and learn
in their teaching success with educators from the institute and around the
world. Limitless topics can be discussed here, without restrictive control of
academic institutions, governing bodies or bureaucracy.
Members
of such global communities act as valuable resources to help guide other
educators along pathways of successful teaching-learning methodologies. It is
all about how cloud is formed in the sky. EitCloud enables teachers, students
and other members of the institute the opportunity to be part of the
conversation in the virtual classroom.
The
Cloud is open. The initiation is passion or we can say interest, interest to
share knowledge and collaborate in reforming education. EitCloud socially
connect educators, where the bigger is the guider and the small ones are
learners and contributors. Educators are people who care about others, getting
into education largely because they wanted to make a difference. And for many
of them, they had to abandon those passions. They were bound by so many
constraints in their lives, that they couldn’t bring themselves to their
imagination. So all of a sudden, social media tools provided educators with an
outlet for this passion. You contribute to cloud because only you are caring. Social
Media and Social group tools help educators to be global publishers and give
them a global voice, while supporting to each other.
4. Give Guidance to Underprivileged Students to Succeed
One
purpose of education is to level the playing field, giving all students equal
access to learning and content, no matter a student’s background—be it racial,
socioeconomic, disability or upbringing. The key is finding a platform that
enables educators to help students learn in a dynamic and open environment, and
creates opportunities for students to help their peers.
It
really needs passion and personal initiative to give students an avenue to find
the academic support they need and encourage students to become the first
generation in their family to attend college and higher educations. Such
individuals or organization uses Social Media technologies to reach wider
audiences and connect them in the education perspective. This promotes a
college-bound culture and a community lending itself to students seeking higher
education opportunities after high school. Role model-college students can
spread positive exemplary information along with inspirational activities for
underprivileged youths to follow, counterbalancing the many negative
influencers they may encounter as they grow up. Through this trusting and well
organized social community, children learn how to deal with stress, raise
expectations, succeed academically and take control of their destiny.
We
can’t deny that there are a number of irrelevant programs which makes use of
the power of social media technologies to expand their influences and divert
young learners in to undesirable directions. However, educators should not see
their hands crossed; instead they need to be creative in designing their
classrooms in new and attractive ways by aligning it with social media
technologies and empowering it with social groups. This enables them to share
their successes with one another and help techno-socio-overwhelmed students return
back to academic success opportunities.
To
illustrate this with an example: Facebook and Google plus have now become
globally recognized social network platforms, as a result millions of students
are registered to the systems (especially facebook) and use them in their daily
life socio-interaction. Educational institutions cannot deny this; instead they
should plan on how to make use of these powerful social platforms to achieve
their goals. Of course the goal of educational centers is to build confident
and globally competitive graduates who make a difference in their prospective
working areas in the long run.
Working
in community practices powered by social media tools for a common purpose (in
our case Education) is more than just publishing educational content or best
practices – it forges relationships and opens the door to worldwide education
success.
To sum up, in the classroom surrounded by social
media technologies and empowered by social groups, education is being
reinvented to take advantage of new technologies, online mediums and web
applications. For many educators, it takes their own initiative to get the ball
rolling – and at EitCloud, we give full support and follow up to the educators
who have already begun redefining the ways students learn and succeed. We also look
forward to supporting many more teachers, students and social media enriched
classrooms as these practices are practices which reflect the 21st
century skills and real world environment for now and the future. Design your
own classroom that changes the learning paradigm to meet the needs of our digital
natives.
