Social Media Learner Support & Engagement

My goal here was to create a student support resource to include in an online course or syllabus. It was important to be able to identify how this would help students, specifically, as the focus is on learner support & engagement.

One of the tools that I have not yet implemented but could see as beneficial to students in the psychology classes that I teach relating to human development/lifespan development is Storify. The intent behind the integration of this tool is multi-fold--student engagement being a major rationale, but also collecting information on a particularly relevant topic for the week(s) that we use Storify. It appears that their newest/pending iteration with Storify 2 may improve collaboration, as well, with additional functionality. 

Here is an example that I located which shows the utility of this tool for a topic, shown here with the topic of "Using social media to get a job": https://storify.com/PBSMediaShift/edshift-chat-using-social-media-to-get-a-job  

And here is another example that is directly pertinent to my teaching discipline and that demonstrates the simplicity of using Storify to post relevant topics from the media: http://www.teendepression.org/related/teen-suicide-statistics/


Here is one that I created on the fly as an example of how I might have students post comments & thoughts on our topics: https://storify.com/srestauri/pick-post 

In terms of directly linking this to student support, Storify would be an easy tool by which to collect together (curate) a few support resources offered by my campus, drop those in, and post this for students in week 1. However, I see the most value in using relevant, current topical posts from social media for them to comment on.
Location: Myrtle Beach, SC, USA

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