Use of Social Media in Teaching High School Students: A Case of United Arab Emirates

Abstract

The use of social media platforms by the education sector has grown significantly in the past decade. The advancement in information and technology has prompted the integration of social media use in education. Social media use has revolutionized the learning processes from what was traditionally teacher-centered to the current student-centered approach. People between 16 and 24 years of age are considered among the active users of social media; hence, by incorporating an important part of their lives in school activities, learning may become more amusing and improve performance. Despite the United Arab Emirates being considered the technological hub of the Middle East, it has made minimal steps toward integrating social media in the learning system for high school students. This article explores the type of social media used by students and teachers in the Emirati high school system and examines the favorable social media tools used in learning in high schools by teachers and students and responds to questions like the purposes of using social media in learning and does social media use in learning affect student and teacher satisfaction and attitude? Further, it asks what the impacts of using social media on learning are. Finally, it discusses the challenges students and teachers come across when using social media for learning.

Learner’s Perception in Using Social Media for Foreign Languages Acquisition

“…Yunus et al, (2019) also reported that the advantage of social media helps develop students' writing ability. Jenaibi and Mansoori (2022) contended that social media context allows learners to manage and maintain a learning space that facilitates their learning activities and connections to peers and social networks across time and place. To achieve this aim, the present work specifically seeks to investigate the following research objectives.…”

Challenges of Using Social Media as a Teaching Tool in Secondary Schools

“…As Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) like social media get used more in classrooms, teachers need to understand the platforms to support teaching (Jenaibi and Mansoori, 2021). For example, secondary school teachers in Nigeria have used Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and YouTube as interactive teaching and learning channels for communication and to share information.…”

“…Besides being competent in their subject's content, teachers need to be comfortable executing pedagogical methods that are relevant in the 21st century (Moodley, 2019). Teachers from disadvantaged schools with limited ICT resources tend to not have the expertise or skills needed to effectively use ICT for teaching (Jenaibi and Mansoori, 2021). These teachers tend to resist using ICT (Jenaibi and Mansoori, 2021).…”

“…Because of this, teachers had to quickly pivot and use online technologies to teach their students and students were encouraged to use these same online technologies to learn (Hatip, 2020). With the resultant increase in the use of social media for teaching, teachers were required to successfully integrate the use of social media into their pedagogical practices (Jenaibi and Mansoori, 2021). Yet there are challenges inherent in using social media for teaching, which if better understood can help teachers manage them, hence there have been calls for more research to be conducted (Ekberg and Gao, 2018).…”

Digital Participation, Surveillance, and Agency: Insights into the Role of Digital Literacy to Manage Risk

“…To date, no studies have been undertaken from an information behaviour perspective; and whilst insights can be drawn from other disciplines (e.g. Media and Middle Eastern studies), some studies involving both male and female participants provide no breakdowns by gender [6][7][8].…”