What Are Effective Ways to Use Social Media for Educational Engagement?
EdTechBrief.com
What Are Effective Ways to Use Social Media for Educational Engagement?
Like the artist's brush strokes that bring a blank canvas to life, social media has become a dynamic tool for enhancing educational engagement and professional development. Insights from leading experts such as a Founder & CEO illuminate unique strategies utilized in today's digital age.
- Offer Tips To Parents
- Make Tech Education Engaging
- Build Community Partnerships
- Connect With Students and Families
Offer Tips To Parents
I offer tips to help parents support their child's education. Creative ways to supplement their child's numeracy skills include teaching patterning using TikTok, or creating a script for their own YouTube short to strengthen their literacy skills. Parents get valuable feedback from teachers by following us on social media.
Make Tech Education Engaging
As a tech edutainer with over 360K followers on TikTok and Instagram, I’ve used social media to make tech education engaging by breaking down complex topics into simple, easy-to-digest tips that people can actually use. Whether it’s showcasing new SaaS tools or quick workflow hacks, I keep things practical and relatable. I also use polls, Q&As, and live sessions to interact with my audience and make sure I’m covering what they really want to learn about. It’s all about turning followers into active learners in a fun, accessible way.
Build Community Partnerships
At Morgan-Oliver, we’ve effectively created our own social media "chamber of commerce," where community partnerships thrive and everyone benefits. By collaborating with local bookstores, civic organizations, educators, and businesses, we’ve built a mutually beneficial network that amplifies our collective efforts.
When we promote bookstore events, our students gain access to diverse literature, while those businesses see increased foot traffic and sales. It’s a cycle of support that fuels both education and local commerce.
Our partnerships with civic-action organizations allow us to share workshops on social media, bringing important social-justice discussions into our families’ homes. This engagement not only enriches our curriculum but also strengthens the reach and impact of those organizations.
By sharing resources from educators and child psychologists, we provide valuable insights to our families, all while reinforcing our role as a hub of knowledge within the community.
And when we showcase student internships and projects from local businesses, we spotlight their contributions while giving our kids real-world experience. This cross-promotion creates a dynamic ecosystem where everyone thrives—students, families, and community partners alike. In short, our social media strategy has turned into a powerful collaborative platform that elevates education and community engagement simultaneously.
Connect With Students and Families
As the founder of an educational services business and previous classroom teacher-turned-homeschool-program director with over 14 years of experience, I'm passionate about social media not only as a means of networking, collaborating with other educators, marketing, and sharing resources, but for engagement (in and out of the classroom) as well.
Social media—when used safely and correctly, of course—is an amazing way to connect with students and their families. Every day, I upload and share photos and write-ups, often including important information from our in-class learning, highlights that showcase different students' successes, and "sneak peeks" into what we're focusing on now and moving forward. This is a great way for my students' parents to get involved through a means that's both less invasive to our classroom and their personal lives. Rather than the pressure of asking for information or scheduling a meeting, parents/guardians can browse at their leisure and simply click "like" to show their appreciation/connection.
Students can also engage (even if they're not of age to use social media!) by simply browsing on their own or alongside a trusted adult. Through social media, students can easily see clips from the day and share them (either through conversations or digitally "sharing" via the social media app) with friends and family members. For students, seeing themselves in pictures, posts, "Reels" or "Stories" is also an easy way for educators to build connections between home and school because students will be encouraged to (and often need to!) share the context of the posts with others for understanding. Being able to see themselves learning or succeeding in the classroom can also create a sense of pride and ownership of their daily activities and encourage them to work harder to be "featured" in the next day's content.
