Are you Influenced Yet?

 Are You Influenced Yet? 

Image Source: Movie Insider

Let's look back to March 2020 when the whole world changed. As I was just in the middle of my second year as a teacher, I remember getting an email that stated we would be at home for two weeks. As teachers around the world would say, it was the most hectic Friday trying to get packets ready for the students. However, the world was determined to make this change easy by providing our students with one-to-one devices. Now, this did not happen at all schools, but it happened at a lot of districts. This made it easier to connect with each other in an unforgettable time. Not only did kids use their devices for school, but they also used it to stay connected to everyone who was going through the unknown just like them. This is when the market for influencers on TikTok and Instagram became so huge that influencers were influencing the whole world and increasing the growth by almost 50% more than the year before. We as educators need to use this information to better educate the students who are growing up in a time that influencers are the normal. 

Image Source: Influencing Market Hub

As I was doing my research, I came across an article from the Pew Reasearch Center that discusses how adults sharing that they get their news from TikTok, has increased from 3% in 2020 to 17% in 2024. The article states that about 4 in 10 young adults now regularly get their news from TikTok. This is a huge increase; however, I am not shocked by this at all because this is where my peers and I get our news from. When my friends are discussing the world around us, we share what we have "read". Most of the time what we have "read" came from a TikTok video. No longer is reading the news actually "reading". As a teacher, I need to take this information and use it when I am creating an engaging learning environment. I can create activities based on these statistics to engage my students in the world today. An activity that I would love to do if I was teaching an older grade would be for my students to use their social media platforms like TikTok and research a current event that is happening via the videos that they are watching. I then would have the students create their own videos or posts that represent the information that they have learned. This way we can see the impact that social media is making for our students based on the information that they are learning. This would also help our students stay engaged with the content that they are learning as they will be using their platforms that they already spend time on. Research like this is so important for educators to explore because we need to change the way we teach as the way technology is used keeps changing for our students. Our students are already using the applications whether we like it or not, they might already be getting their news from these platforms. These students grew up in a world that technology is so advanced that students of any age can understand/use it more than some adults do. 

Image Source: Pew Research Center
52% of Tik Tok users regularly get their news from TikTok in 2024. In 2020, only 22% of users got their news from TikTok

Pandemic Funding Supporting Technology:

As I mentioned above, the pandemic created funding for our students to have access to one-to-one technology. One-To-One technology means that all students have a device provided by the district. This could be iPads, tablets, computers etc. Now teachers need to figure out how to continue to adapt new technology into the classroom as the pandemic created such a strong relationship with it. In the article Beyond the Homework Gap: Leveraging Technology to Support Equity of Learning Experiences in School, it discusses that 60% schools and district administrators agree that technology when used well in the classroom will benefit our students in the classroom. However, we need to make sure that all students have the opportunity to have access to these technologies to create future successes for all students no matter where they go to school. Since the pandemic, there have been a ton of fundings to help the increase technology in the classroom. Below is a chart that shows how districts are using their funding for technology investments from 2019-2021.

The article says that there are five goals that should be looked at when collecting funding for new technology investments. Those goals are improving home-school-communication, improving the quality of instructional materials, increase teachers understanding of how to implement technology within lessons, increasing student engagement, and providing new and equitable educational opportunities for all students. The Spectrum Enterprise who collected data for this article, looked at how districts are already benefitting from using the funds to better our technology usage. There have been huge increases for all five goals from 2019 to 2021. With home school communication it has increased to 74%, improving the quality of instructional materials and enhancing teachers' skills with technology went up to 61%, increasing student engagement improved to 52%, and providing new opportunities for students increased to 51%. I was pleasantly surprised when I was reading the increases in percentages, as I see these goals declining in my district. Ever since Covid, we have a had a hard time creating strong relationships with our families. This even causes a ton of our students to have chronic absences. If students do not come to school, we surely can't increase any academic goals. I am happy to see that around the United States, schools are benefiting from the increases in funding. However, like this article has mentioned we need to make sure that every kid is given the same opportunities to get the same results. I will be sharing this data with my school, as I believe this might help us in our goals. We can come up with plans to increase our communication with guardians and improve our instruction materials as we are a one-to-one district. 

                                                                        References:

Chavda, J. (2024, September 19). More Americans – especially young adults – are regularly getting news on TikTok. Pew Research Center.

Influencer Marketing Hub. (2024, June 24). The State of Influencer Marketing 2020: Benchmark Report.

Perez, E., Manca, S., Fernández-Pascual, R., & Guckin, C. M. (2023). A systematic review of social media as a teaching and learning tool in higher education: A theoretical grounding perspective.

Project Tomorrow. (2024, September 11). Special Report #1: Beyond the Homework Gap - Project Tomorrow. Project Tomorrow - Preparing Today’s Students to Be Tomorrow’s Innovators, Leaders and Engaged Citizens.

Toness, B. V. (2021, July 14). Millions of kids are missing weeks of school as attendance tanks across the US.