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TedTalk: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Social Media


Teaching & Learning in the Age of Social Media

 

One thing about me is I LOVE a good TedTalk, and will probably post a few throughout the duration of this blog. This week I looked specifically at how Social Media and education can interact. This video struck me because it focused so heavily on my current field: secondary education. The speaker of this video posed a very important question: How do we as educators pose questions to our students when almost every question is "Googleable?" I think this question is also vital to think about when using AI in the classroom- what do we do when students can have a machine write their paper in 5 seconds or less? 

Luckily, I think this is where teaching is really of the most importance. A student may be able to AI generate a paper, but a good teacher WILL generally catch that the paper is not the student's own work. We have AI checkers to combat this, but we also know our students because we talk to them and get to know them as people. A student caught AI-generating a paper can be given a learning opportunity on how to use AI to help them do the work, not simply do the work for them.  

This video also brought up a great point about the role emotions play when using social media. Nothing is better at engaging younger groups of students than social media. The school I work in has a no cell phone policy, and it is very strict until the very end of the year, once testing has concluded. Allowing the students a free phone day is the quietest I have ever seen them,. This is interesting because they are still talking and interacting with one another in the class, but with a focus on the videos and posts they are looking at on social media. Every night before bed, my fiance and I lay next to each other and send each other reels to talk and laugh about. We are both interacting with one another and in an online space, engaged simultaneously in both spaces. I think playing on this emotional response to social media could work wonders for engagement in the secondary classroom and beyond. 

Comments

  1. ShiyaoMay 23, 2025 at 3:45 PM

    Hi Jorann, I am thrilled that you posed this question. This is exactly my attitude towards using AI in teaching and interacting with students. The important ability of interacting with technology, not limited to AI, is the ability to ask questions rather than simply answer questions. AI can always provide an answer, but what matters in this process is the student's ability to figure out whether this answer makes sense to them, how AI figures this out, and what they can learn from this process of interacting with AI. Looking forward to more discussion like this...

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