With the rise of smartphones and expanding WIFI networks, social networking has become an important part of a student’s social life. It is now considered as a learning platform which helps in improving student engagement and capabilities. Such platforms provide school children the opportunity to connect, get in touch, access information, and research.
In today’s global era of connected learning, the influence of social media platforms on our education system is becoming a strong controlling factor. Social Media which is considered as one of the strongest mediums of communication in the 21st century helps people to connect from far places. It consists of online technology platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Whatsapp among many others. With the massive use of technology, the world has merely become a small place.
Social Media has many positive effects on education including better communication, timely information, socializing online, learning, enhancing skills, making a career among others. But the same has some negative effects which include identity theft, cyber bullying, and social isolation. Let’s discuss in detail the most crucial aspects of Social Media; both positive and negative to get a clear picture of its impact on education.
The positive effects of Social Media:
- Encourage Online Learning: With the advance use of Social Media platforms, the students get encouraged and motivated to learn. Educational videos on YouTube, The use of YouTube to watch educational videos, easy access to e-books, online notes, learning via video calling are some of the major aspects which contribute to educational development.
- Enhances Academic Performance: Another crucial impact of Social Media helps to enhance student academic performance and increase their knowledge through data and information gathering.
- Enhances Creative Element: Social Media helps in enhancing creative skills for children by allowing them to learn and later execute the same by doing it themselves. Quite often a student’s hidden talent is revealed when he/she starts to take pictures and uses online editing skills to make them look aesthetically appealing. Lot of youngsters are also engaged in creating videos for YouTube. A lot of students have interesting hobbies that they post online via videos and photographs which helps them to realise their potential for making it a career. Social media usage in any classroom can be a great source of education which enables to inspire students to obtain knowledge.
Along with so many positive aspects of Social Media on education, the same has quite a few negative impacts too. Let’s have a look at them as well.
- Causes Distraction: Social Media platforms are major factors that are leading to distraction and hindrance of mind. These days students tend to lose their focus from studying and rather enjoy browsing on Social Media. All of this leads to wastage of time without learning anything from it. Most of the time, students are incapable of submitting their work in the specified time frame because they are more focussed on using Social Media platforms.
- Impact on Health: Use of social media sites with sheer negligence can have mental as well as physical effects on one’s health. Students do not take their meals on time, do not take proper rest and by continuously being on phone or laptop can also have adverse effects on their eyes. Such acts make students lazy and unmotivated to study or even go out and meet people
- Reduces learning and research capability:With the extensive use of Social Media, students these days are depending more on such platforms to gain information and knowledge rather than looking out for the same in books, journals or notes. As it is easy to extract information online, reading habits of students along with their learning and research capabilities are reducing
Conclusion
The effect of social media on education is not all black and white. It can be a distraction or you could use it to collaborate with others on a project. It all depends on how you as a student, choose to use it.
Following are the pictures of some learning on social media, Instagram and Facebook:
