Social Media and Social Sharing

In the digital age, we have more ways of communicating, collaborating and sharing than ever before. This video from the University of Derby offers a brief introduction.

Social media and online sharing tools are also used widely in education in formal and informal ways, for creating active, interactive and collaborative learning. If you follow some of the links to creating online learning resources earlier in the course, you will find a wide range of opportunities for using social media and social sharing in your teaching. One big benefit is that your students may already be using many of these tools and will be both familiar with how to use them and - hopefully - receptive to using them in education as well.

Social media

Social media is a term used to describe websites and services where participation and interaction between friends, family and like-minded strangers is encouraged. Social media allows us to make connections, share information and stay up to date, and each site or service has its own unique purpose or approach.

As discussed elsewhere in the course, direct communications between tutors and students can be complicated with social media tools, but when used to share resources, these tools can be very convenient.

Popular sites include:

• Facebook:  a social networking site that shares information, events, pictures, videos and ultimately memories with friends and family.
• X (formerly Twitter): an information-oriented site that shares users' text, links and images in short 'tweets'.
• LinkedIn: a business networking site that shares information and allows recruiters and colleagues to find those in similar lines of work.
• Snapchat: a multimedia messaging app that erases messages after a short time.
• Bluesky: An alternative to X (Twitter).
• Substack: A media platform, popular with writers.

Your students will be using some of these, but there will be others that appeal particularly to younger people. It's a good idea to stay aware of these, even if you don't use them yourself.

Social Sharing Tools

In addition to file sharing (discussed in the next section), there are many social sharing tools that are specific to a particular medium or purpose. These are some of the most widely used:

• Instagram: an image-oriented social media app that shares pictures and short videos.
• Pinterest: an image-based bulletin board for creating and searching groups of images.
• Padlet: An interactive bulletin board for groups of people to post text and images.
• Wordpress and Blogger: the two largest blog publishing services.
• Tumblr: A microblogging and social networking website.