Online Social Media Applications for Language Teaching and Learning

As the development of technology, people tend to interact through internet. This virtual interaction happens in social media application. I, myself has begun to have a social media account since 2008. It was Friendster that became my first social media. However, its popularity began to decline in 2010 as Facebook started to raise its popularity. Besides Friendster and Facebook, there are a lot of social media nowadays, such as Twitter, Path, Instagram, Line, and many more. This development of social media also affects the education field, especially in teaching and learning process. Some people began to create a useful social media application for teaching and learning process.

According to TED-Ed Blog, there are 25 awesome social media applications that can improve teaching and learning process. In teaching and learning process, sometimes, students need to present their work. There are some useful applications that can be used to present, create and code, such as TED-Ed, Haikudeck, Duolingo, Draw and Tell, Animoto, iMovie, Instructables, Hopscotch, and Tinkercard. Moreover, for everyday classroom need, both teachers and students can use Evernote, Explain Everything, Educreations, and Oxford Dictionaries. For collaborating on school projects, Slack, Google Apps for Education, Schoology, Midmeister, and Wikispaces are useful social media application for students and teachers. While, some example of social media applications for communicating with students and their families are Remind, Edublogs, and ClassDojo. After giving assignments or projects, teacher should give feedback to students so that they can improve their ability. Besides giving, teachers need feedback from students so that they can improve the quality of a lesson. There are some applications that allow teacher to give and receive feedback, such as Edmodo, Socrative, Moodle, and Google Forms.  

I personally, have had an Edmodo account since 2014. In my opinion, it is a useful social media in teaching and learning process because both teacher and students can interact in simple way. Moreover, parents may also involve in teaching and learning activity. Through Edmodo, teacher can easily upload the material and check the students’ work. Teacher can also give feedback from students about the assignments given because Edmodo allows student to give response about the assignment. Therefore, teacher can make some improvement toward the quality of the assignment. If you want to know further explanation about those 25 useful applications, you can go to this page.