Week 15

     Using social media as an education tool is an excellent way to incorporate something millennials consistently use to make them enjoy learning more. However, I never realized how difficult it is to use social media within instruction. After doing our group presentations and having to use our specific social media platform within the presentation, I realized how truly challenging it is to do so.
     My group had Twitter for our presentations, and I think we got kind of lucky in that aspect. I think Twitter was one of the easier tools to incorporate into a presentation. We found the easiest way to use the tool within our presentation was to tweet what we wanted to ahead of time and then just go to Twitter as we were presenting to show what we wanted to show. This way we didn't have to take time out of our presentation to tweet out the things we wanted to. We never even really considered doing our presentation by tweeting during it because we knew it would be too difficult. We would have had to stop talking to go and tweet, and we would also have to take the time to go and find what we wanted to tweet in the midst of our presentation.
     Our presentation definitely could have gone a little smoother. However, it didn't for a number of reasons. For starters, we could have probably practiced a little more to make the transitions from PowerPoint to Twitter more smooth. If we had the chance to go back and fix it, I think I would want to simply because I am a perfectionist. And our presentation was not perfection. Part of the problem also stemmed from Twitter itself. After we tweeted something, we couldn't go back in and rearrange the order of the tweets. That really frustrated me because I tweeted things out as I found them, but that was not the order I wanted to talk about them in. Another problem came in the form of not being able to have Twitter and PowerPoint show on the screen at the exact same time. Therefore, we were constantly having to go back and forth between PowerPoint and Twitter. I wish there had been a way to use both at the same time.
     Overall, I enjoyed doing the presentations and it was nice to be able to incorporate social media into it. Most people our age are always on social media, so using it to help teach about the platform itself was an interesting experience. Things could have gone better, but this just goes to show the problems using social media in the classroom can cause. But I would probably do it again if I could.