ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the challenges and benefits of students’ use of online platforms such as social media. As students participate in online networks such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube, they portray and enact relational ways of being. To reflect on students’ languaging actions in their online interactions, teachers can have students write about the personas that they create and maintain online through the use of language as well as the varying identities that they negotiate across social media platforms. Given that much of online interactions are done with and for others, students are motivated to create content for social action with others such as blogs, bookmarking and annotation tools as well as on Twitter, synchronous chat sites, and image- and video-based curation tools. Students also employ digital platforms to engage in social work of portraying the negative effects of social and economic activities to transcend their own local communities and experience cosmopolitan literacies as they engage with global audiences. Participating in a critique of media, students can reflect on how portrayals and identities available in and across digital/media platforms shape their relational ways of being
