“A course on Catholicism begs for visual richness and interactions with objects, architecture, and art.”
For being online, using something as present as Catholicism is extremely useful to students. Religion is something that is widely accessible via the internet and a lot of artifacts are kept over time. We can thank the Catholics for preserving so much of their history, therefore making it an interesting lesson or course to teach. This speaks to the major themes of the week by exploring the fact that social media in the classroom is not always a bad thing. Social media has been stigmatized as a distraction, which it definitely is in the classroom. I think if we as teachers utilize that more often, students will be more engaged and more inclined to engage with their peers. Using social media is a good substitute for a test. It could be a way that teachers can assess if their students have grasped the material as a formative assessment or a summative assessment.
“Every student was required to make a new Instagram account that they would use just for class—to minimize the awkwardness of using their personal accounts, and I too made an account that was private and just for class use.”
I think the biggest question I would have about students creating their own social media accounts would be the distraction aspect. How do we as teachers ensure that students are honestly sticking to the social media accounts made in class? Social media, even though it can be a way to further engage students, can also be a huge distraction for them as well. The laptops don’t allow students to use Twitter or Instagram, so the phones would have to be the option. I don’t have an issue with using social media to further my students’ learning, but my only question would be how do we keep the distractions under control?
“The flexibility and creativity of this platform and their facility with posting and viewing text and images in this way yielded strong work, critique, and analysis in ways that directly fed into our class discussions.”
I agree with this statement wholeheartedly. Despite having questions about distractions and how those would be under control, using social media is way more engaging than a discussion board. Students are not just illustrating what they have learned, they are also able to engage with peers in a way that feels like second nature. This is an example of allowing students to have fun with a subject such as history, and that it can be taught in more ways than just a lecture.
