1. Social Media and the Impact on Education
Social Media and Home Education
Magda CHELLY Hana MATAILLET
CEO, WinAkademy Commercial Department, WinAkademy
WinAkademy Soutien Scolaire WinAkademy Soutien Scolaire
Paris, France Paris, France
infos@winakademy.com / http://www.winakademy.com infos@winakademy.com / http://www.winakademy.com
Abstract—This document describes the impact of the social media schools, colleges and secondary schools and the positive
on education and home schooling or tutoring. The new impact it has had on children’s lives.
technologies are used by children every day for different
purposes. We tried to analyze the use of these new technologies
II. SOCIAL MEDIA
through social media in educational organizations.
The past decade has seen the rise of social media, with the
Keywords—tutoring, education, social media, teaching, new current dominance of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, the last
technologies one being the second largest search engine in the world.
What is exactly social media and how it is used?
I. INTRODUCTION
The education field has gone through significant changes Social media networks are interactive and collective tools
over the past few years. With the developments in technology, on the web that give people the opportunity to create, share and
that have helped to design better and more advanced learning publish information, build communities and communicate
tools, new subjects have been added to the educational around the world.
programs and teaching methods have evolved. As Social Media has become a viable marketing and
The 21st century has become a digital world that has borne customer service channel, many organizations are looking to
digital natives. These children have never lived without a quantify and understand the impact of their overall marketing
computer and spend hours online looking for information, investment of their business in the industry.
creating or sharing it. Quantifying the impact of social media includes multiple
Nowadays, web environment offers limitless virtual variables and companies or organizations often fail to
opportunities through the use of social networks. understand and value their efforts properly in terms of the
potential long-term business benefits of this type of channel.
Those social networks or social media are becoming more The companies cannot seem to see the profits generated by the
and more influent and widely spread. In fact they are the new integration of social media into their commercial and
tools of the digital generation. They affect a very large public marketing strategy.
composed of children, teenagers and adults, and give
opportunities to better communicate in a community and to What about education and educational organizations?
create close links with people around the world. As a matter of fact, the impact of social media is not limited
The objective of this paper is to show how social media has to industries; education has also been influenced by the social
impacted the education of our children and how it could be media communities. Actually, the movement of social
integrated for education purposes. networking has already taken place in general education and is
looking to leverage the potential of social networking for
The leitmotiv is based on the existing popularity of these educational purposes.
social media and their integration into educational
organizations for learning purposes. The use of this new channel to communicate has helped
children, teenagers and adults to grow and be completely
The structure of the paper is as follows. First, it will present integrated into the new digital world.
an overview on how social media has gained momentum in
today’s world and educational system and how children have Although it can be harmful to children in the way that they
used these networks to communicate better. Secondly, this can lose focus on school and can reduce their academic
paper will present how social media has been integrated into performance, it can also be beneficial for teachers and for
children and become a learning environment, only if it is used
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2. responsibly and correctly, under the monitoring of parents for These media give the ability to rapidly connect with
young kids. students and highly influence them. Therefore this new
communication channel affects the educational system. Moods,
comments and recommendations can be shared and advices
Educational organizations that implement systems in order and expertise provided.
to connect and inform the various actors of Education have not For a new innovative educational organization, it’s
yet quantified the impact of the social media on educational important to enlarge its perspective and try to incorporate
purposes [1]. social media into the organization’s strategy.
III. SOCIAL MEDIA AND EDUCATION Many organizations use the Facebook platform to quantify
social spinoffs of a new service or new project, by estimating
Understanding the impact of social media on the the number of “Like”, for example. This number is becoming a
educational system is very complex and requires multiple real social indicator and could give a precise product or service
variables. performance.
With the ever-growing amount of information being found The impact of social media indicators cannot be neglected.
and produced on the web, through blogging sites to social As noted previously, those are important as they help drive
networking sites and now niche social media, children are now product sales or a new service performance. In education, they
largely immersed into a digital world. could show the importance of the students’ interests in different
99% of children are behind their computers participating to educational topics, for example.
any online activity while only 10% participate in class. A Education organizations must be aware of this important
change in education is clearly needed and has actually well channel and should take it into account in their communication
started; educators are no longer the main source of knowledge, strategy in order to have a major impact on their pupils and
Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, all those websites students.
offer endless resources for students. However, we need to teach
the students how to effectively use these resources.
IV. SOCIAL MEDIA AND EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
The 21st century learning skills have changed in many The template is designed so that author affiliations are not
ways. We could define them by the level of collaboration kids repeated each time for multiple authors of the same affiliation.
and teenagers have with each others, associates and specialists Please keep your affiliations as succinct as possible (for
globally, and the connectivity, in other terms how fast they example, do not differentiate among departments of the same
connect to resources by using broadband access. Connectivity organization). This template was designed for two affiliations.
and collaboration are two main capacities that give a brand new
set of skills that are updating the reference by which we are With the growth in Internet usage, coupled with the
measuring scholar attainments, student standards and student continuing scope of Wi-Fi, we are observing a real facility to
learning capacity. Thus, it is important to change the way of connect to the social media at any time and in many locations,
teaching and the way students learn. with any device. In fact, the availability of wireless could not
be more than helpful to the social media connection, as well as
How can social media be used in education without the new-generation terminals that modify the access to Internet
affecting the students negatively? (smartphones, Android tablets, etc.) [2].
The objective is to use those networks to connect with other As we can see from the graph below, Figure 1, since 1997,
classrooms, globally communicate with students or educational the percentage of Internet connection in educational institutions
actors, and enrich the lives of students by bringing interest, is growing to reach a 100% use at colleges and secondary
excitement and learning experiences. schools in 2004.
Our research shows the importance of the implementation
of social media platforms, as the future best ways to involve
children and teenagers in learning and knowledge, and to have
a wide open vision of the world.
The benefits that can be drawn from the use of social
networks are the development of creative skills, and the
opportunity for students and kids to be leaders in education and
empower them to grow as digital and global citizens.
The barriers that are encountered when trying to integrate
technology into classrooms or with educational actors appear
with either with privacy issues, from the lack of knowledge
from actors of the education world, or with people against
change.
In order to be efficient, social networks needs to be used as
functional tools and critical resources in an academic way.
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3. Figure 1. The evolution of Internet Connection in French Educational Social networking brings such a positive impact on children
Institutions, Source : http://www.senat.fr and school: a lot of resources, many connections, people, and
experiences.
We can then conclude that Internet connection is widely
available for all pupils and students. There is no time wasted if it is used efficiently, the time is
only used differently.
Technology is infused, especially in developed countries,
where all students have laptop, and have labs available to work For example, Skype is being used in schools to
on. (These devices are usually provided by various communicate across countries, help to share and exchange
foundations). aspects of different cultures, and communicate with new
friends in new places.
The students can then reach each other via social networks,
creating groups on Facebook for example and exchanging School directors or directors of programs should inform the
information about academic work. [1][2] Actually, Facebook parents about interesting people to follow or add for their kids
has already integrated a networking session where students can account, such as authors, or artists.
join their school network and discuss.
Social networks also help to orientate the kids in their
Educational videos exist on Youtube or Vimeo : a way to future career and learn about different types of jobs in different
learn while having fun. fields. They can learn about a lot of fields than can educate
them, such as Youtube showing news or up-to-date videos.
Of course, there has to be a limit to the use of these social
networks, so that children don’t fall into a “virtual world” and Of course the enthusiasm may be impaired a little bit, and
it always have to remain for education purposes and help the we cannot expect success every time, because children are
children in a constructive way. interested to chat and have fun, but if school and teachers give
them a real project to be excited about, and set up objectives, it
Social media could also involve the educational actors such can work.
as teachers and tutors, and it could be very helpful and
productive to have them using those networks in a constructive We are wondering what are the criteria needed to build
way. Teachers need resources and support. Professional such efficient tools ?
learning communities are now different: they have changed
Our researches lead us to the conclusion that the success of
from on-site into professional learning network online.
a social media is based on these parameters:
With this goal in mind, we elaborated a new online
• Simplicity
community for pedagogical purposes. This community allows
all the actors to share information with each other and it is a • Ergonomy
free platform with pedagogical approaches.
• Interactions
• Media : Images and Videos
• Personalization
• Buzz
Children need to be attracted by a community platform that
looks like the one they are usually using but with educational
Figure 2. The pedagogical community, Source : http://la-pedagogie.com
information and applications.
The image 2 shows the first page of the free pedagogical The research also reveals that the impact of a social media
online community dedicated to educational actors. depends on how many followers can be reached through this
media.
The purposes of this community are to build a real
exchange between experimented teachers and un-experimented Many publishers of "social platforms" enable industrial
ones and allow every educational actor to speak about their companies to build a community spaces with collaborative
pedagogical methods and techniques. measures to support innovation and participatory support
(forum, opinions, votes, share ideas, news feed, members
V. SOCIAL MEDIA IN SCHOOLS scoring, answers certification, etc).
When schools organize a big project or activities, for These solutions could be adapted to the educational
example, or when they want to put news and information, they companies and offer a real rich cooperative space.
can add it on their Youtube account, Twitter account, Facebook
In fact, many schools or colleges have already created a
account.
“virtual campus” where students connect and get their courses
Schools, students or teachers have created groups and can and grades, can get information on teachers, can chat with their
collaborate with other groups in different schools, through classmates and submit their homework.
social bookmarking sites , or other social networks, and hash
In elementary schools, those social networks need to be
tag the school name or group for example.
monitored by parents, and strict rules need to be established.
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4. More schools should get involved and build social When we look at the popular social media, we can see more
networking websites, collaborate with other universities or “freedom of speech” when people talk. We could relate it to the
schools and create a large network through which students can school community, however we should be very attentive of the
study, research, as well as socialize with each other. impact of this freedom and this is why values of the school are
so important. [3]
In terms of getting pupils and students to show an interest,
social media can prove to be an excellent tool.
VII. CONCLUSION AND PERSPECTIVES
It can also allow students the opportunity and the means to
interact with one another in a more collaborative way[3]. The objective is for educational institutions to define a
strategy and define the transmitted values on the community.
Our research is based on an approach that takes into
VI. GOING FURTHER consideration the development of the social media in the
industrial world and the educational institutions.
A. Listening and Answering
One of the objectives of these social networking platforms Results acquainted are promising and let us think of
is to allow the educational company to measure its presence on innovative methods for communicating amongst educational
social media, analyze the nature of the conversations and the actors.
feeling of Internet users. Teachers could analyze the students’ In addition, using social media as a means to further
needs by analyzing their conversation and their answers on the education is a great way to get children involved and to help
forum. them interact. It brings them excitement and interest about
The objective is for educational institutions to define a learning and transmitting information.
strategy and define the transmitted values on the community. The rise of social media will gradually lead to a disruption
It is a good way to provide advice, create a connection of the functioning mode of educational institutions, if the
between teachers and students and share recommendation, "visibility" of this phenomenon and the "multiplication of
information. points of contact" primarily affect the student-teacher
relationship models, it will actually lead most schools to
thoroughly review their strategy by implementing more
B. Taking part in conversation Information and Communication Technology and social media.
As we said before, it is very important to have interactions
in social networks to allow it to work well and have a growing The main goal of this paper is to show the importance of
reputation. The more users or followers exist, the better it is. In implementing social media in the daily school life [4].
fact, there should be a member of the educational actors that
will supervise the community and interact with teachers and REFERENCES
students. [1] Kriek, L., “Mobile social media for a private higher education institution
in South Africa”, 2011 3rd Symposium on Web Society (SWS), 26-28
A person, such as Community Managers in companies, Oct. 2011, South Africa.
could be present to interact with the community members to [2] Magda Chelly, Adel Ghazel, Riadh Tebourbi, Nel Samama, “WiFi
answer question. The goal is to help schools and institutions to Hybridisation with Pseudolites and Repeaters for Indoor Positioning
better know the real needs of students and parents, and Purposes”, ENC-GNSS 2008, Toulouse, Mai 2008, France.
difficulties they may encounter. [3] Silius, K., “Evaluating the quality of social media in an educational
context”, 2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference
Also, it’s good and beneficial for the school to connect with (EDUCON), 4-6 April 2011, Amman, Jordan.
pupils or students and see them excited about a topic and learn [4] Van Meter Community School Librarian Shannon McClintock Miller,
something new. “Positive Effects of Social Media in Education”, New Leaf and Learning
Conference, (YouTube), June 1 2011, United States.
In terms of profit, these interactions are necessary and give
the social media more power.
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