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Benefits and dangers of social media in education

Mine, thank you very much for sharing this link. In my classrooms, the most frequent problems I come across are unoriginal thinking, plagiarism, and cheating. Although social media tools are amazing in that they are up to date, I have doubts on their effects on critical thinking skills of the students. Another case is informality, of course. The tools do limit the vocabulary the students use. I guess the problems that I listed are interconnected in some way. In short, we can conclude that the speed to reach, and the brevity of information the Internet and social media provide push students to be shallow in many respects. It's up to us as teachers to utilize the tools in the best way possible.

Here you can find really good advices to stay safe in your social networking connections. The advice for being prepared to answer questions about your social networking page or other social account in job interviews is a good one that I didn't realize before.

This is not an infographic directly related with educational technology, yet I thought it's a good reminder first for myself (as I sometimes find it hard to paraphrase while avoiding plagiarism) and all my fellow researchers. Plagiarism is common fear of each student. You risk being plagiarized and you risk creating non-unique text. To get things even worse, not only mindless copy-paste constitutes a danger. Your piece is considered as plagiarism when you try to combine the author's original word combinations with yours. This is the so-called patchwork paraphrase.

I do not know if a similar guide is available for Turkish teachers, but the General Teaching Council for Scotland has prepared a guidance document to help Scottish teachers with "identifying potential dangers, offering some guidance about how to avoid them and providing a context for responsible, professional use of electronic communication and social media." The guide concludes as follows: Before posting materials online stop and ask yourself: (1) Will the content reflect poorly on you, your school, employer or the teaching profession? (2) Is your intention to post this material driven by personal reasons or professional reasons? (3) Are you confident that the comment or other media in question, if accessed by others, (colleagues, parents etc) would be considered reasonable and appropriate?