Academic Uses of Social Media Technology in the High School English Classroom

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to explore the potential uses of social media in high school English classrooms. Also explored is the reasoning behind integrating social media into the English curriculum. Social media use falls under the heading of digital literacies, but social media requires users to interact with each other, which sets it apart from non-social media such as PowerPoint presentations and computer word processing. Social media allows adolescents to perform multiple identities and to produce a wide variety of texts. Bringing these out-of-school practices into the classroom poses challenges for educators, though. Recent research begins to delve into how and why social media deserve a place in the classroom. Furthermore, educators may rely on case studies and practitioner reports to help fill in remaining gaps such as assessment of social media texts and processes. The paper explores how some teachers use social media to meet traditional goals of the English curriculum. Social media is a relatively new field, so there is also a discussion of some of its issues and implications of its future use.