Exploring Social Media for Education

Besides, LME teachers were successful in organizing their daily meetings using Zoom to discuss classes, work on lesson plans, organize professional development, reflection, and other LME activities. We are still in the process of exploring and using it. Flipgrid is another social learning platform that LME is using it. It allows teachers to create assignments to facilitate video discussion. Each assignment is like a message board where teachers can pose questions and their students can post video responses that appear in the display. Initially, we have been using the application to share a short reflection for the teachers; however, we extended its use to students to do 1 minute 30 seconds reading on a daily basis. Now, we have more than 40 students and 5 teachers who read every day using the application and share them on the display. It has several advantages of using it, first, the teacher can use the recorded video to help students improve reading, and second, it helps both students and teachers see improvement over time, third there is flexi-time to upload the video, next it is easy to use and facilitate interactive doable activity.

It has been a good learning experience for us to reconsider and recognize the importance of how we can make use of social media in education. We are excited and looking forward to the post-pandemic. Definitely, we see a lot of potential in this approach to education.

The COVID-19 virus, as it spreads across the globe, was an unexpected obstacle and disruption to many people and their work. For Lhomon Education (LME), we stopped our classes and teaching sessions as we came to know about few cases for Bhutanese travelling from abroad. Thereafter, Chokyi Gyatso Institute (where we teach), closed its gate for outside visitors and restricted its monks from leaving the campus. This necessary precautionary measure interrupted our normal classes and forced us to explore alternative means to organize classes and to engage our teachers and students.

So, we took this lockdown as an opportunity to work out our plan B to maneuver the current challenges. This is how we started to explore and use social media platforms. First, we used the Zoom application (teleconferencing software) to organize meetings with fellow teachers as an experiment. Then, gradually we used it to organize the classes with the students. The Zoom video conferencing provides a user-friendly interface with easy to use, high-quality HD video and audio, and collaboration facilities such as text chat and screen sharing. We were able to use these facilities to make interactive classes by sharing short videos, presentation slides, storyboards, images, texts, and audio. In the process of organizing several classes, we also learned how to conduct online classes interactively with slide shows, projecting photos, short videos, engaging in discussion, and keeping the session short.

Besides, we have used Messenger (Messaging app), Google Drive, email, WeChat, and Google classroom to communicate daily, exchange documents, and carry on the lesson plan. We will keep on using these applications and look for other platforms.