Nicholas Provenzano's Argumentative Analysis

By generating innovative ways students can interact with their family and peers via different networks, social media has gained incredible popularity amongst students of all grade-levels. While students have come to embrace these alternative methods of communication with great delight, teachers have not welcomed these social networks as warmly. From a teacher’s perspective, social media plays the role of the ultimate student distraction. The distraction has played out from sidetracking students away from homework outside of the classroom, to averting their attention to their gadgets in the classroom. In “Social Media Can Be Your Ally” by Nicholas Provenzano, he reasons that social media is not a teacher’s enemy. On the contrary, he explains, it is a tool used to maximize student education by extending the lesson plan outside of school hours through different social media platforms. In this article, he elaborates on three specific social media apps used for classroom purposes: Remind, Twitter and Instagram.

Moreover, the article shows how different social media platforms serve different purposes outside of the classroom. First, Provenzano introduces Remind. Ideally, Remind is a free app that teachers can use to send group

Twitter can be downloaded as a free app or accessed via website. Provenzano writes that he uses Twitter to make public announcements such as announcing the day’s homework or sharing random thoughts which relate to class material. Provenzano adds, “A student visiting Baltimore once tweeted a picture of Edgar Allan Poe's grave because we'd just completed a unit on his stories.” Unlike Remind, Twitter allows students and teachers to exchange conversations. Teachers can use this to answer questions outside of class. Nevertheless, different schools have different rules in regards to how students and teachers may communicate outside of school, so this may or may not be a feasible