Online Social Media Applications for Language Teaching & Learning

Social media is a mean of communication that allows us to participate, share, and socialize with the world, including blogs, wiki, etc. Social media can be used for business, entertainment even education. There are social media that can be used as education apps with many functions, for instance:

A.      For teaching students how to present, create and code.

This function can encourage students to improve students’ presentation skills, ability to perform the language. Those can also help them for example making videos from the website and make those into presentation. The apps are in the following:

·         TED-Ed

·         Haikudeck

·         Duolingo

·         Draw and Tell

·         Animoto

·         iMovie

·         Instructables

·         Hopscotch

·         Tinkercad

B.      For everyday classroom needs.

Classroom needs that are provided for students help them translate the target language, make it easier to make notes about the lesson without using handout, and so on. The apps are in the following:

·         Evernote

·         Explain Everything

·         Educreations

·         Oxford Dictionaries

C.       For collaborating on school projects.

These apps can help the student to communicate easily, sharing ideas, and discussing  the lesson between two or more English classes. The apps are in the following:

·         Slack
Google Apps for Education

·         Schoology

·         Mindmeister

·         Wikispaces

D.      For communicating with students (and their families).

This function will provide the opportunity to engage not only the students but also the parents. Moreover, when the parents know the improvement of their children, it will make them evaluate their children ability. Therefore, the teaching learning activity will be done as they expect. The apps are in the following

·         Remind

·         Edublogs

·         ClassDojo

E.        For giving (and receiving) student feedback.

This function makes the lesson and exercises that have been done easily scored or graded. Besides, the teacher can give advice to the student directly.

·         Edmodo
Socrative

·         Moodle

·         Google Forms

Those, the apps that has mentioned have a lot of advantages for teaching, especially English. Afterwards, it makes the teaching-learning more efficient, effective and fun.