The impact of social media on education holds both positive and negative sides. There is a bunch of positive effects of social media on education which has highly transformed the educational style of the teachers and students. Actually, social media is affecting students’ academic performance at a very high pace.
This article covers the positive and negative influence of social media on educational institutes, teachers, and students as a whole.
Researchers define social media as “the relationships that exist between a network of people.”
It is a widely accessible free electronic tool, used for publishing, accessing, and collaborating any kind of socially acceptable content and information with the world, and a way to build new relationships.
Nowadays, social media has become one of the most important, next to the food, in everyone’s life.
It is a tool of the trade for businesses, a platform for playing games for kids and sharing relevant information with the media groups, and a digital classroom for learners.
It is a most emerging mixture of content-sharing platforms for the communities.
Billions of People do watch and share, trillions of posts on Facebook consisting of text, photos, video, and graphics.
According to research, YouTubers upload about 720,000 new content in a day which is equal to 30,000 videos per hour and one billion hours watched every day which becomes about 41.6 million hours per hour.
News poll estimates that 84% of teens aged 14-17 use social media and almost half of the kids aged 10-13 use social media, with young people spending up to seven hours a day on them.
In fact, hundreds of thousands of young people today cannot imagine their lives without daily visits to social networks, they draw information from news feeds, and Internet sites, and communicate through the comments of live magazines.
In another research, about 97% of the youth are using social media. This ratio is increasing gradually.
Even, people who cannot read and write use to watch content on social media platforms. They do check the status of their relevant content and reply using emojis.
Due to the rush of smartphones and freely available internet, especially cellular companies’ data packages, social media channelized the educational standard. Hence, it became the tool of the trade for institutions, teachers, and students.
There is an element of good and evil in everything in the world. Now it’s up to us to decide which aspect to take.
If something is used for the right and legitimate deeds that benefit the world of humanity, then obviously its bounties and blessings will be very beneficial.
The same is true of the use of social media. Although I’ve written a lot on social media before.
This article covers all the Positive and Negative Impacts of Social Media on Education related to education, particularly the education system, teachers, and students.
The Impact of social media on Education in terms of universities, schools, and other educational institutions is relatively beneficial.
As they use social media, mostly Facebook and WhatsApp, for public and self-interest. Almost all universities conduct communication with their stakeholders, which will be effective for everyone. This is where the interest in social networks comes from.
Nowadays, each university has its own pages on all the major social networking platforms, in which students can find out various news not only from educational, but also sports, cultural, creative, social, and scientific activities.
Also, every university has social media team for building solid strategies to promote institutes on the right platform. They post their performance by sharing videos, and photos on social networking sites.
- Grabbing more public attention is by sharing the institutional brilliancy of both teachers and students.
- Communicating with faculty members and staff by creating private official chatting groups
- Circulation of various announcements, notifications, and events, especially for new admissions and new sessions.
- Sharing the institution’s social, ethical, and moral partnership on their pages and groups
- consistently share the facts, figures, and success stories of their brilliant faculty members and students.
From a teacher’s perspective, the impact of social media on education is comparatively beneficial.
It plays a vital role in the betterment of education by providing a rapid, collaborative communication platform.
As per quantitative research carried out on university teachers, the teacher used to share the assignments and quizzes on the private groups, like Facebook and WhatsApp groups.
An educational survey, states that about 80% of teachers prefer to share the assignments, coursework, class schedules, class venues, and other study-related information on social media.
Also, they prefer to communicate, both by call and text, with students over the social media platforms.
It is the right time; our teachers and educational institutions need to understand the fact that social networking platforms can and are becoming teaching tools.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networking sites and applications can be used for educational purposes; however, teachers need to be proficient in using them.
Thus, there is a dire need for capacity building for understanding, how can these sites be used for teaching and learning, and which social networking platforms can be helpful for educational purposes?
- Sharing assignments, notes, quizzes, and sometimes results as well
- Communicating with students and parents using text and voice notes
- Online conferencing and group discussions, specially rubrics with students
Like teachers, social media also have a broader impact on the academic performance of students. Researchers have found that there is a higher rate of influence of social media on the academic performance of students.
After physical classroom sessions, social media is one of the most used platforms for discussion, communication, and collaboration between students. They use social media for assignments, course-works, class schedules, and class venues.
Also, find the solutions related to their course and class. Except for their own educational groups, they join other available groups and pages for the resolution of class-related challenges.
It also provides the virtual campus environment, where students share discuss and comment in accordance with their class group. With the proper usage of social media platforms, students can understand new skills, improve quality education, get familiar with innovative technologies, and enhance their creativity.
As per research, YouTube is a mostly used and trusted tool for lectures. Facebook is an effective platform for virtual classroom environments and document sharing. WhatsApp is the right platform for speedy communication.
Despite benefits, social media platforms severely affected the performance of the students. Researchers have shown that students spending more time on social media have incredibly low grades in their final exam results.
Unfortunately, the students who have a high tendency toward social media have extremely poor results.
They show more interest in social media and less in educational activities. Meanwhile, while using social media, students become mannerless due to informal communication over social media.
Besides the education performance, due to immatureness, students get involved in private relationships and immoral activities. These activities drag them into the worst category of society.
One of the major disadvantages of social media is information privacy.
Juggernaut drivers use personal information, content, and photos. Hence, they get extortion money by blackmailing.
Pros and cons of Social Media for students
Pros
- Social media is a wonderful way to effectively communicate, collaborate and coordinate with peers.
- Bother teachers and students observe and familiar with new technologies
- Students can improve their skills and add value to careers and livelihood.
- Prompt resolution of their societal and education problems by sharing issues on social media.
- Students become more design-oriented as they apply new and creative ideas to their profiles.
- Pupils get to know about extraordinary aspects of applied education that are not being taught on the premises of the classroom.
- Quick discovery of hidden talent as they share their talent on different social media platforms. Their shared content led them to their dream work.
- Freedom of expression, make students elegance.
Cons
- High distraction during classes. Students surf social media on their smartphones or laptops throughout the lecture. It has also become difficult for the teacher to observe the attention of the class participants.
- The informal environment of social media made the students careless in terms of improper grammar and spelling. Paying attention to the learning and enhancing vocabulary, they completely rely on the AI spelling tools.
- Students’ learning and retention power become extremely poor as they pay less attention.
- Book reading habits have badly suffered due to social media. Instead of referring to books, they visit social media platforms for their relevant queries.
- Ethics of information or knowledge filtering obsoleted. Young scholars copy and paste the data without knowing the source. Resultantly, the shared and selected material brings out terrible effects.
- For educational institutions, internal or private correspondence is flooded with social media, which causes them a massive loss in terms of integrity.
- Students lose the attitude of physical communication.
- A data breach can be a major cause for trapping innocent students.
- Most students waste their time on social media by playing games, even during exam days. This causes severe effects on both time and money as well.
- Students create fake profiles for scams and cyberbullying. Similarly, fake people get in touch with the students
Conclusion
In conclusion, social media has become a fundamental factor in our lives. It has revolutionized and transformed the traditional way of communication and the sharing of information.
It became necessary for every life factor and social sector of the world to make themselves available on social media. Furthermore, it has both positive and negative consequences on society and has become an integral part of our lives, with both benefits and drawbacks.
The good impacts are considerable, but they are chained to the negative consequences.
Like other fields, it is being highly observed in the education sector. Educational institutes use it for drawing the attention of the public by sharing their performance and achievements.
Heads of institutions communicate prefer to communicate with the faculty and staff over social media. Similarly, Teachers discuss and collaborate with their students and peers.
They post assignments, events, results, and information about other educational activities to keep updated with their students.
For students’ social media is more than a blessing where they get every information at their fingertips.
The use of social media is not limited to communication with teachers and class fellows, but also to get creative ideas from other groups.
As a negative consequence, social media increased the competition ratio among the institution, which causes them to utilize more funds on advertising.
This can be because of an increase in fees and student-related costs. Teachers get unusual and promotional messages from the institutions, especially performance pressure.
Last but not least, students are highly suffering from the overdose of social media drugs. They spend much time watching, surfing, and chatting on social media, by which they are generally delivering very poor academic performance.
Students’ physical and mental health became very disturbed. Also, cyberbullying and data breaches and scamming activities are high risks for the students.
The use of social media has a higher benefit for Institutions, teachers, students, and parents as well.
The students are misusing the tool of the trade. Recent studies resulted in the very poor academic performance of the students, because of excessive time spent on Social Media Sites by chatting and luring new friends and fun. It can be because of an acute shortage of intellect and creative future minds.
Students must be informed about how to use virtual social networks responsibly and constructively.
They need to understand how to interpret information, differentiate between sources of information, and give an account of the benefits and negatives of using social media in particular situations.
In order to do this, they must first understand their own objectives for using the network and then proceed from there.
In order to educate students about the appropriate use of social networks, educational institutions may create orientation spaces for students before applying corrective measures.
Students and parents must be made aware of the advantages of social networking under the guidance of pedagogical processes created by teachers.
The institution must make adjustments to its teaching and learning methodologies that allow students to develop skills in working with new technologies as they come into play.