TEACHER VS SOCIAL MEDIA

by Alfi Anggraeni

       According to Margaret Roose in Whatls.com, social media is the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Websites and applications dedicated to forums, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking and wikis are among the different types of social media. Social media is wonderful and powerful thing, yet it can also be quite harmful and lead to bad choices. Tells about social media, we know today's it's important to every people, included for teacher in her/his learning process. why social media is important for teacher? How it can influence the learning process? 

    Here the main target of learning process is to transferring the knowledge from teacher to the student. But, the way to transfer is not easy. It may be appear some problems if the teacher don't know how to delivering the materials in the good way. The problem that will appear such as: (1) Students will assume that those lesson are difficult and it will make the students didn't interested about the lesson. (2) It will influence the student score. Of course, if students didn't like those lesson it will produce bad score. (3) Less motivated of the student. With less motivated so it hard for teacher to teach and delivering the materials quickly. 

    So here the teacher must up-to-date for her/his method and techniques to teach. Today's in this globalization era, all of the activities are using social media. And it's possible for teacher to using social media as their method and techniques to delivering the materials. One of advantages of social media is the ability to communicate with many different people at one time. For example, in English Language Teaching (ELT) the teacher asks the student to using social media to communicate with foreign people by using Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, or etc. ; it's one of the effective way because they will fun and easy to improve their English and open their mind that English is interesting lesson. Another case, when the teacher and the student have long relationship, they will using social media to communicate. In conclusion, the biggest advantages of social media is its power to connect people. it has become a popular way to connect people not only informally but academically.

      "Yeah, as a teacher I agree that social media are very useful for education. It because in modern era all of the students knew how to using social media. When there is no regulation for teacher to connect the social media and education, I'm worried that they will used social media to negative thing because they lack of the activities in social media. But, if teacher used social media in education it will make the students more active and busy to doing task or learn, and there is no time to doing negative thing". Said Kartini (a teacher of Bantul Elementary School)

       Here as a teacher Kartini using some social media to support the learning process, although her students are Elementary School students but every student have gadget. Initially, she thought that no need to using social media or something like that in learning process, but she worried that students will used their gadget for something that not important, such as chatting with another person every time or upload photos and status, it's better to chatting with their teacher or their class friends or upload photos and status about their class activities. 

      Until now Kartini still using social media to support learning process, it because she get so many advantages with using social media and it makes their students more active in the learning process such as, (a) students more easier to gets important educational resources; (b) easier to submit homework and assignments when the teacher cannot attend to the class; (c) easy to share some interesting topics. And for teacher, it will make easier to surveying the students activities. As a teacher you can now inform your students about the new survey through Twitter. Find out what they like/dislike about your class, what changes they would want to make, what books they would want to make, what books they prefer to read, or what recreational activities they would prefer more. 

       All of the reason about advantages of social media are good, especially for the teacher learning process and its needed because of the demand era and its also good to explore the students' ability. But, do you think that there is no disadvantages of social media? I don't think so. As Kartini said before that she worried when her students using social media to negative thing, so it's one of the disadvantages of using social media. For specific reason, let's see the reasons why social media is not perfectly good for education. The first disadvantages is the lacks of a personal touch; inability to connect in person. How the teacher can understand the students' need and the students lack if there is boundary between teacher and student; the boundary here is social media. Students will gets more knowledge from social media than their teacher.       Then, open to security issues (hacking, viruses, etc.) , social media susceptible with technology crimes and it's dangerous. In brief, it will better if teacher using direct learning by using creative method and techniques, if perforce to using social media used it properly.