7 Ways to Use Classroom-Centered Social Media

Classroom-centered sites like ClassDojo, Seesaw, and others offer teachers the ability to produce social media–style posts with text, photos, and videos. These posts can only be seen by registered and approved users such as parents, administrators, and students. For me, the ability to communicate in this new way has changed my teaching. Beyond just posting a picture or video of what we‘ve been doing in class, classroom social media has enabled me to teach and communicate in unique ways: rethinking performances, creating new musical experiences, and delivering information in new and engaging forms.

Here are seven ways that I use classroom-centered social media.

1. Modeling and Teaching Students About Social Media

While there are clear downsides to social media, our students will undoubtedly be exposed to it, and in many ways expected to use it, in their teen and adult lives. Classroom-centered social media offers an opportunity for teachers to model how to use it and give students practice.

As we create and post content, there are a few concepts that I often reiterate to my students. First, posting should be positive. Second, I am always using the platforms to show what students know and are able to do. Third, we rerecord content if it feels like the video is showing something different than we intended.

I often have a student be the camera operator, as this is a skill that is becoming increasingly required for many jobs. As a bonus, camera operator is a highly motivating position for students.

2. An Archive of Engaging Material

Students love seeing themselves and their peers perform. Since I’ve been using classroom social media for several years, I find it’s an incredible source for engaging material. Often when I introduce a new song, dance, or project to a class, I can show my students a video from a previous class.

My students learn what worked well and can identify things to focus on to make their performances stronger. I also learn from these videos—the common problems that students encounter and how I can be proactive in addressing them. I can also easily download videos to leave with substitute teachers for easy review lessons.

3. Multiple Ways to Engage with Material

While older students are able to have detailed, focused rehearsals, younger students do best with lots of different modalities that help them engage with the material that they’re trying to perfect in performance.

As students learn a new song, I record them while they read the music. Then, I have them listen to or watch the video later to provide two ways to interact with the song text. We may even watch other class performances to see what we can learn from them.

When I work with younger students (in kindergarten through second grade), we can work on a song in these different ways for 15 minutes or more with high focus and engagement.

4. Frequent ‘Informances’

Decades ago, elementary music educators began to embrace the idea that formal performances with students might have diminishing returns. Rehearsing and perfecting a single long performance often means less overall learning and growth. As a result, music teachers began to hold “informances” (informal performances).

Informances display student learning with a particular focus on how learning occurs rather than a perfect, polished performance. A post on classroom social media is a great venue for informances. I’ll often show a first draft of a performance in one post and then follow up with another video from the next music class to show how students have progressed. I find that it also works well to post a small section of a song we have down really well and follow up later with the whole song when it’s performance-ready.

5. New Musical Opportunities

The social media videos that you post can become a new member of your music ensemble. Earlier this year, my students were learning an African-styled drum groove. We recorded the drum groove, and then I slightly increased the speed of the video and recorded students singing with the video of them playing the drums in the background.

Posting these videos allowed my class to perform an extended ensemble piece in one class period rather than having to split the class into groups, which would typically take several periods. In addition to modeling multitrack recording with students, the progression of videos also provides the kind of “informance” for parents that I mentioned earlier.

6. Commercials and Challenges

Sometimes, I post simple videos to encourage parents to check out work that their kids have done or to attend an upcoming performance. At times the “commercials” are as simple as a student holding a paper with the performance information in front of the camera before we perform a quick preview.

Recently, my first-grade students created four-beat rhythm patterns. I took a picture of them holding up their music sheets, and I posted a challenge for them to play those patterns on an instrument at home.

7. Serial Learning

If I need to teach a complicated concept, I create a series of posts or performances that explain it to students (and families) in small chunks. As third-grade students learn how to play steel pans (also known as steel drums), we study the history of steel pans in Trinidad. Each third-grade class made a video telling a different part of the story. Each class produced their own 45-second video with a paragraph explaining part of the instrument's history. Over the eight-day rotation, students watched the other classes' videos and put the story of the entire history together.

These seven activities have all been a win for my teaching. I have great tools that maximize the time I spend with my classes. My students are fully engaged in creating these classroom-centered social media posts and enjoy watching themselves later. Parents have clear ideas of what their kids are learning and how excited they are about it.