I recently had the opportunity to develop and host a short professional development workshop on using social media in college classes. Our goal was to present social media as a tool to enhance discussions and interaction among students in a course and between instructor and student. We highlighted options to enhancing this connectivity outside of the classroom to keep students engaged between in-class meetings, as well as using it to overcome challenges with keeping large classes (over 50 students) engaged.
My co-host serves as the social media manager for Penn State, so I was able to gain quite a bit of insight from him while we were developing our content and activities. When I first started thinking the workshop early in the semester, I was intimidated and thought I couldn’t possibly have enough professional expertise to guide other students and faculty on teaching methods. By the time my co-host and I were finalizing our lesson plan, however, I was feeling much better prepared. It definitely shows how much I have learned in AEE 530 this semester.
A strength in our workshop design was our use of social media and technology in administering the workshop. We filmed the entire workshop using Periscope, which was one of the platforms we discussed. We also used Poll Everywhere to start off our workshop, which allows participants to answer survey questions using the text message feature on a cell phone.
Without knowing the typical internet or social media usage of our attendees, we opted to keep the information presented fairly broad. We gave some general background on social media and uses for each platform. A weakness in this method was that we only had one hour to administer the workshop and did not take time to show the audience how to use a platform if they were unfamiliar. In future workshops, I would make sure to do this since we received feedback requesting it.
To close the workshop, we administered a Post-It Note survey, where participants were given two colors of Post-It Note and used one color to highlight what they had learned that they found most exciting or interesting and the other color to highlight what their biggest concerns were regarding social media usage in the classroom.
We received 
a wide variety of answers! Some of the most prominent concerns involved the privacy of internet material used in course discussions and the potential for social media to present distractions rather than benefits. A way to overcome the distraction potential would be to focus on using social media between class meetings rather than during in-class time. We did not have clear answers for our audience regarding the best policy for privacy.
Areas that our participants found most exciting were the potential to generate discussion from introverted students and the ability to keep class variable and new.
Through putting together this workshop, I reinforced some ideas I had and learned many new things. It was very rewarding to see discussion generated among attendees. I look forward to continuing to learn about social media and generating new ideas for using it in academic settings.