I am an avid user of Reddit and often use it to explore topics of interest. As I use Reddit predominately on my phone, I often receive notifications of subreddits that are of interested to me based upon content I upvote or subreddits I already follow. The vast amount of topics that have a relevant subreddit is astounding, any niche subject will have a community of people that contribute to a subreddit! Using Reddit in a professional sense is not an option I considered before now, I usually use Reddit for topics that are of personal interest to me. I think if Reddit were to be used in a professional sense, I would definitely need to increase my skills and explore if the platform is appropriate for professional interaction. As Reddit allows users to create subreddits about any topic, this gives staff freedom to create specific subreddits that allow users to upvote critical information. With the positives of Reddit, there are also some potential negative with using this platform in a professional sense. Using Reddit in a professional setting, especially from an educational perspective, staff and students must be aware of the spectrum of content that is viewable on Reddit. As mentioned previously users can create subreddits on any topic and this can sometimes involve material that is not age appropriate for primary students. Teachers and the Teacher Librarian must use tools to restrict student access to certain parts of Reddit and ensure the responsible use between colleagues by setting clear outlines of appropriate behaviour on Reddit and having separate personal and professional Reddit accounts.
The use of various other social news platforms may be more appropriate in the education context. In INF506, there are many more examples of social news sites
- Digg
- Newsvine
- Hacker News
- Nuzzel
These social news sites are very unfamiliar to me however their value in the educational context is not to be downplayed. Further research into these social news platforms is very important when deciding which platform would be the most appropriate. Using these social news platforms would allow students to contribute to news topics as well as demonstrate to teachers and educational staff what is important to them and what they deem is the most crucial news to their education.
Further Research:
As stated above, I aimed to further research these social news sites and I have added an additional note regarding this exploration. I did a personal search of each of these news sites and found that Digg was the most user friendly layout however the Hacker News website had a very similar layout to Reddit which was very familiar to me therefore easy to navigate. The exploration of social news sites spurred an interest in how I could incorporate news sites into Years 3-6 learning. Burns (2017) highlights some of the most common and effective news sites for children including National Geographic for Kids, TIME for Kids and Newsela. These sites, among the others recommended by Burns (2017), would be successful options for a current events unit for years 3-6 that incorporates social news sites as a basis for discussion and inquiry.
References:
Burns, M. (2017). Teaching with the news? 15 current events websites for students. Class Tech Tips. https://classtechtips.com/2017/12/19/teaching-news-current-events-websites/
