You have your unit of study and your lesson plans. Add this one small piece: everyone– including you–  pick a social media service and follow someone who blogs, tweets, tumbls, scoops, or pins about the topic. If you work with younger students, you can do this as a class and use it as an opener each day or week throughout the unit. Students can write a response to the author, which incorporates what they learn in class or a summary for class that can be used as a basis for discussion. You can also form small discussion groups based on platforms or topics.  The goals of this strategy are to introduce students to a variety of social media sites, teach students how to evaluate social media sources, learn the vocabulary of various social media sites (i.e. the term is tweeter not “twitterer”), help students to see social media as a source of information, and demonstrate the “social” in social media for academic purposes.