A notification pings🔔 on your smartphone when you are studying for your finals. That’s an engaging social media post from your classmate about an innovation. You click, open, and read the post. Boom!💥 You see yourself spiralling down a rabbit hole of educational articles, videos, and especially memes.
After hours of scrolling and laughing at funny comments on meme pages, you realize that you spent more time on social media than preparing for your exams. However, social media, from YouTube tutorials to study groups on Facebook, has the potential to revolutionize education.
But here’s the kicker: while it offers endless opportunities to enhance your learning, it also leads to distractions and misinformation. Impact of social media on student education is a vast conversational talking point that I’ve compiled in the section below for EduLize Readers!
What is Social Media? Double-Edged Sword
Social media is a set of technologies that allow people to create, react, and share content among multiple virtual platforms.
Put simply, social media is a way of sharing, reacting, and sharing content on multiple platforms, like web-based, mobile applications, and other forums. The majority of the social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, work on the basis of User-Generated Content (UGC).
Although some popular social media platforms also encourage students to enhance their learning experience through collaboration, integration, and making new friends online to get advanced education resources. Let’s have a look at them!
Here is the list of the most popular social media platforms for students that they should be active on.
- YouTube – Uses for Educational Video Tutorials and Long-form Knowledge Retention
- Facebook – Uses for global Social Interaction and Learning Resource Sharing within Teacher Pages
- Instagram – Uses for Visual Engagement in Learning with Educational Influencers
- X (formerly known as Twitter) – Uses for Learning Resource Sharing with Direct Access to Experts
- TikTok – Uses for Short Educational Video Content and Micro Learning
- WhatsApp – Uses for Community Learning and Educational Resource Sharing
Impact of Social Media on Student Education – Overall
Social media can be both bad and great for students education. On the one hand, it can assist students in starting learning and having an understanding of complex concepts socially in a fun way.
They will have the opportunity to find out multiple learning resources on social networking sites while connecting with their mentors. YouTube, X, and Facebook platforms provide extraordinary online tutoring and virtual programs to allow students’ learn something new every moment.
Yet, just similar to the double-faced platforms of social media, it has drawbacks that are not good for students. Students who spend a lot of time on social media require more time to complete their assignments or acquire sufficient sleep.
That makes it difficult for them to perform actively in school and may get bored at school. However, both positive and negative impacts are somehow happening in every student’s life. Let’s dive deeper!
Positive Impact of Social Media – Positive Changing Force
The positive influence of social media indicates how useful social media is in society, communities, and individuals as a whole.
Further, impacts of social media has surrounded different aspects of life, including entertainment, education, communication, activism and relationships.
Here are 4 positive impacts of social media on student education:
Platforms like Instagram, X, and Facebook provide beneficial resources for effective online learning. You can approach information and news about activities and events that are occurring around the world 🗺️.
Teachers are free to make informative or educational videos on YouTube, which are easily available for students. Further, you may consume the fresh releases to get knowledge and education from these videos for knowledge retention.
Social media has made it easier for students to collaborate and communicate with each other for learning purposes. Moreover, you can create groups on different networking platforms like Facebook and Instagram where you may communicate with your fellows.
This approach makes it easy for learners to collaborate on a single project and get problem-solving solutions from teachers. In this way, such platforms fill the distance gap between students and teachers, so students get knowledge and information at their doorstep.
Social media offers multiple collaborative opportunities for students to enhance their productivity. They can connect with experts and professionals in their disciplines of education to share their projects and ideas and get positive responses.
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram enable students to show their skills through videos, multimedia projects, art and writing. This approach allows them to showcase their creativity level and make connections within the community on social media.
Access to e-learning platforms, like Codecademy, Coursera, and YouTube, to study advanced online education courses, has become easy because of social media. This approach enhances students’ professional growth while equipping them with essential skills to take an advanced step in their careers.
These platforms provide you with multiple online courses to equip you a valuable skills that help you stay advanced. Moreover, if you are still learning, then you can go for a language learning course to make your learning effective.
Negative Impact of Social Media – Scrolling into Trouble
The negative impact of social media indicates the disastrous consequences on society in multiple aspects, including mental health, privacy, social norms and relationships.
Here are 4 negative impacts of social media on students’ education:
Social media has made it easy for bullies to frighten and harass their victims from far, far away. Cyberbullying can lead to anxiety, depression, and even self-destruction at a young age. So, students should be aware of this dangerous side of social media and use it very carefully.
Furthermore, disclosure of cyberbullying, unfeasible duties level, and online harassment on social media can intensify stress and adversely affect mental health and academic achievements. These days, cyberbullying is a major factor which badly affects students’ health and educational goals.
Addiction to social media has developed a significant headache among students. Several students spend hours on social media platforms, which disturbs their academic performance, as it causes different mental health problems among students.
Including depression, anxiety, social media comparison and low self-esteem are some of the most common problems that can occur. The excess of everything is bad, like social media, which is more charming; its excessive use badly affects the students academic career.
Students may finish up believing in the wrong information because social media makes you believe in while making data-driven decisions. Exposure to biased content and wrong information isn’t a good thing for students’ education and for their academic careers.
Our young generation, Gen Z, is more attracted to social media platforms, and they mostly get the wrong information. Like they use short words that may change their meaning in different aspects, like LTR and ISTG.
Distractions are alarming situations for students because that’s the most common danger they will have in their lives. It can disturb their attention and focus goal and make it hard for them to concentrate on their studies.
Ultimately, students may face some alarming situations like finishing homework, studying efficiently, and classroom activities become difficult because of distractions. Thus, social media can cut-off student’ education progress and bind their capability to shine academically.
What Do You Think?
Social Media is a double-edge sword for students because it can be both beneficial and harmonious for their academic career.
What Do You Think? Does it play an important role in education? Should every student use it?
When it comes to usage, it’s everyone’s preference, but yes it plays an important in education while dealing with wrong sides as well.
As, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg go to high school, and also deal with several distractions, which made him a successful billionaire.
It’s my personal opinion that you should use social media, but in limit because that’s the only way you can progress!
