It’s hard to keep up with the pace of innovation like Social Media Education that is coming from the internet. Businesses and education are struggling to make use of new Web 2.0 trends like social media. Social media has enabled everyone to connect and collaborate on a scale so easy and so quickly like never before.

Young students who have grown up in the internet age are used to its fast-paced nature and are already using it for school projects. Unfortunately for teachers and educators, most who have started using the web the last 10 years, fall short on fully utilizing the web’s tools that their students are so familiar with.

Social Media is what’s happening now on the web, and it’s here to stay. Here are some creative ideas on using Social Media Education in your classroom.

1. Twitter-based Classroom Discussions

This is great for big classes or lectures where students might feel shy to ask a question. Set up a class account on Twitter.com and ask your students to ‘follow you’. Make sure they sign up for their own account. (You may have to run a short tutorial on how to use twitter.) Post articles or videos for discussion by your class. Tell your students to mark their comments with a hash (#) tag. Hash tags help twitter to keep track of certain discussion threads and make these conversations easy to retrieve in the future.

You can review all the comments around the hash tag discussion with twitter monitoring software like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. Simply, create a column to monitor the hash tag. After you can review the conversation with your students.

2. Wikis

Wikis are online documents which are community generated. The most popular wikis being Wikipedia (which your students will be already very familiar and reliant with.) Your students will feel proud to show off the information they find and also feel the responsibility to review their peers’ work.

One ideas is to get your students to collaborate on a major topic in class like a current event, or a textbook chapter. Split up the topic into smaller portions and assign them to groups. Afterwards get the groups to edit the wiki for spelling or grammer mistakes, and of course factual errors.

More great ideas for using Wikis in the classroom (Smartteaching.org).

There are many Wiki communities out there, some free and paid ones are wikisineducation.wetpaint.com (paid), www.wikispaces.com (paid), www.wikidot.com/plans (free and paid).

3. Facebook-Based Discussions

One great idea is to have discussion in the form of comments on pictures or videos you post on your profile. For example, if you are an english teacher, get your students to practice their english by posting their comments on a picture with poor english explaining why it is poor english. Or they can give their suggestions on a video of an english conversation in a restaurant, for example, on how to improve the responses when ordering food. You can review their comments together at the next class.

4. Virtual Seminars

This one’s more useful for distance education. Use online seminar software like Webex to reach out to your students with powerpoint presentations and through voice broadcasting. Since it’s free for listeners, who just listen through the browsers (so no software downloads are needed), it makes it easy and simple for you to broadcast to a large audience.

The cool part is the ability for your listeners to raise and vote for questions they’d like to ask the speaker, in real time. As a speaker you can stop and answer the questions or wait until the end to answer your audiences most popular question. Alternatively you can use Twitter and a hashtag (#) to monitor questions / comments from the audience.