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Associate Professor Carol McGranahan of CU’s Anthropology department discussed her experience with social media in her teaching when she presented during the Teaching with Technology seminar series. In her presentation, Dr. McGranahan assessed the impact that the use of Twitter and blogs in her classroom had on student learning.

Through Twitter, McGranahan tweets relevant course information, such as links to pertinent articles, that anyone from the public at large is allowed to see, but it is mainly targeted at her students in the course. Through using a class hashtag, students can easily find the course information tweeted by McGranahan. Although her Twitter account generates a lot participation from individuals not enrolled her courses, it turns out it is not the most effective method for creating digital engagement in the course. McGranahan discovered that a large number of students are not on Twitter, especially the undergraduate demographic.

By integrating blog posts into the class, McGranahan found that students truly engaged with the material and it yielded good contributions from the participants. To ensure the effectiveness of the , TAs spent a considerable amount of time preparing the questions for students to respond to as McGranahan believes that when you give good topics, you receive better results. Throughout the semester, each of the students in her two lecture courses, where this approach was employed, were expected to respond to 6 posts. McGranahan felt that with this approach, her student truly engaged in course theories in a way that she had never seen before and that she received tons of great responses from her students. Although the blog is specifically geared towards to her Anthropology courses, it is accessible to the public. McGranahan believes that this improved the student’s writing as their work was not just for their instruction, rather it was for the world at large. According to McGranahan, she believes that in certain courses and contexts it makes sense for student work to be open for others to read rather than hidden behind firewalls.

The different approaches employed by McGranahan reveal the positive impact that social media can have on the digital aspect of the classroom experience. With the incorporation of Twitter and blogging into her courses, students gain more real world experience as the work that they produce for the class is available online for the entire world to see. Through these different approaches, McGranahan has discovered ways to utilize social media in the classroom to improve the experience for her students.