Students are Waiting on Teachers to Join EdTech Movement

In this 2016 article, Howard Pitler responds to a student’s Education Week commentary to urge teachers to learn social media. A new section below updates it with 2024 teen platform data, where teachers now learn from one another, and 2026 state phone rules.

Last spring Katie Benmar wrote an editorial, My Favorite Teachers Use Social Media: A Student Perspective, in Education Week. Educator Howard Pitler, a frequent edCircuit contributor, shared his thoughts after reading David Greene’s perspective last week.

It isn’t often that EdWeek publishes a commentary written by a high school student, so when they do, it’s important to pay attention. In Katie Benmar’s commentary, My Favorite Teachers Use Social Media: A Student Perspective, Ms. Benmar calls to our attention the huge chasm that exists between the adult understanding of social media and the reality of a student’s world.

How Adults Understand Social Media

We adults think social media is mostly looking at family pictures and silly cat videos on Facebook. Most of us are unaware of the apps a typical student uses to engage with their peer group. If I mention Kik or Tumblr to a group of teachers many are wondering if I have suddenly forgotten how to spell. Talking about Instagram, Vine, and Whatsapp engenders a blank look. While many adults now have Facebook and some even have Twitter, they often use it as one-way communication. I hear comments like, “I need to get on Facebook to see what new pictures my kids have posted of my grandkids.”

At a recent workshop I asked the 50 assembled educators how many had Twitter accounts. Less than half raised their hands. I then asked how many used Twitter as their primary professional learning network (PLN) and the number of hands dropped to single digits. When I asked my 50 workshop participants to post to Twitter during the workshop and tag me in their posts, the response over the next three hours was underwhelming. One teacher even proudly and defiantly stated she didn’t have a Twitter account and never planned on adding one because “real learners rely on printed material to learn.”

Why Teachers Avoid Social Media

One of Ms. Benmar’s assertions is that very few of her teachers leverage the power of social media. She writes, “To succeed, we are told, we must do our homework and study for tests. This is true, but teachers often fail to give sufficient consideration to one important roadblock: social media.” I believe there are two main reasons for this.

First, teachers see social media as a distraction from learning rather than a powerful tool for learning. Why would we feel otherwise? For many of us social media is just that. It’s a distraction or diversion from the real work of life. When they see a cell phone out during class they assume the student is off task. If a student dares snap a picture of a presentation slide or project they risk losing their phone or even being sent to the office.

Because adults don’t learn this way – students can’t either.

It’s just not how we define learning and rigor. I remember being in a staff meeting, not that long ago, when we were all directed to close our laptops and put away our phones so we could pay better attention.

A second and more powerful reason for the disconnect is that as adults, we just don’t understand and appreciate the magnetic pull of social media. We need to remember the pressure we felt in middle and high school for peer acceptance. I remember the pecking order in the high school cafeteria. I knew who the “cool kids” were in part because of where they sat and with whom. My social group was the band geeks. I looked up to the jocks and cheerleaders, but at least I wasn’t in the AV or chess club. Now magnify that pressure by a magnitude of 1000 and you can begin to see the power social media plays in the lives of today’s kids.

If they post a picture on Instagram and it doesn’t get immediate likes their status has been diminished. It doesn’t matter they don’t really know all of the people who liked the picture – it only matters that it was liked or commented on. It makes the student feel important, popular, and well liked. After-school conversations today revolve first around social media, who is popular, who just posted something that got a lot of likes and who said what about whom online, and then secondly about school (if there is time).

Social Media as a Tool for Learning

Teachers tell me that kids today need to put away their #@%#$ iPhones and get their heads into their books instead. They ignore the current student reality and by doing so, the power it might have for learning. When a student looks at her Instagram or Vine account between classes she could be seeing classroom related posts mingled in with her friends’ pictures. She could be leveraging Whatsapp and its group messaging feature to engage with peers and bring into the discussion voices that are mostly silent in the classroom. She could be using hashtags on Twitter to build discussions between students from different classes and even schools.

Teachers need to adopt the same growth mindset in themselves they want in their students. Try announcing to your students that you want to learn how to use Instagram and need their help in learning how to post school-related pictures.

Diving into social media in earnest seems daunting, just like diving off the high dive seemed in our youth. Eventually you decide to take the plunge and find out you can do it and that people respect you for the effort.

School Policies on Phones and Social Media

In some schools another conversation has to occur first. Too many schools have policies that prohibit cell phones in students hands in the classroom, prohibit teachers from communicating with students via social media, and even prohibit teachers from collecting student email address or cell numbers. We punish the bad behavior of a very small number of teachers by treating all teachers as potential criminals.

I will end this by quoting the end of Ms. Benmar’s commentary. She writes, “I hope that educators will consider experimenting more with technology and social media in their classrooms in a way that will be intellectually challenging to students. Believe me, your students will appreciate it, even if not every attempt is successful.”

Should teachers use social media? A 2026 look at students, platforms and phone rules

Should teachers use social media for their own learning, and should they use it with students? Howard Pitler, writing in 2016 in response to a student’s commentary in Education Week, argued that teachers should, because the gap between adults’ picture of social media and students’ daily experience had grown wide. Much of the landscape they described has changed, and two things in particular affect a teacher’s decision today: the platforms students actually use, and the rules many states now apply to phones in school. This section covers both and suggests a way to separate the questions.

Which platforms students use now

The article names Kik, Tumblr, Instagram, Vine and WhatsApp as examples of apps that many teachers had not heard of. The Pew Research Center’s 2024 survey of 1,391 U.S. teens, ages 13 to 17, gives a more recent picture. YouTube was used by 90 percent of teens, TikTok and Instagram by about six in ten each, and Snapchat by 55 percent. WhatsApp was at 23 percent, Facebook at 32 percent (down from 71 percent in 2014-15), X at 17 percent and Threads at 6 percent. Nearly half of teens said they were online almost constantly, compared with 24 percent a decade earlier, and 96 percent used the internet daily.

Two lessons follow for a teacher reading the original. Pitler was right that adults and students use social media differently, and the gap has not closed: the platforms that teachers first learned, Facebook and Twitter (now X), reach a much smaller share of teens than video and photo apps do. A teacher who builds a classroom account on one platform should ask students which ones they use before choosing. Pew’s survey describes teens’ own use and says nothing about whether any platform helps learning, so it supports awareness of students’ world and not a particular classroom method.

Where teachers learn from each other now

The article also urges teachers to use social media for their own professional learning. Education Week reported in December 2024 that some educators who relied on Twitter for peer connection were trying Bluesky, that weekly educator chats were reappearing there, and that Threads had not taken off with educators after more than a year. The report describes a group in motion, so a new teacher should ask colleagues where their discussions take place. A fuller walk-through of hashtags, chats and starter packs is in edCircuit’s article Helping Educators Take the Mystery out of Twitter, and the piece the original links in connection with Pitler, Using Twitter to Supercharge Your Professional Development, covers the same theme.

Phone rules have moved in the other direction

The original suggests teachers could help students use phones and social media for learning, and it criticizes schools that prohibit phones in classrooms. Since then, state policy has shifted. Education Week’s tracker of state cellphone policies, updated on July 28, 2026, counts at least 39 states and the District of Columbia that require school districts to ban or restrict student use of cellphones, and notes that other states encourage or recommend that districts do so. The tally does not say which of those rules apply all day and which only during instruction, so a teacher needs to read the exact rule for the state and district.

That does not settle the question Pitler raised about students’ lives online. It means a teacher cannot assume that asking students to post, search or message on a personal phone is allowed in class. The article’s concern about policies that bar teachers from contacting students through social media is also a district-by-district matter that is worth checking before any use.

Separating the questions

The answer to whether teachers should use social media is clearer when the question is split into three parts. The following are suggestions, not findings from the sources above.

1. Professional learning. A teacher’s own learning network usually raises the fewest policy questions, and the platforms matter less than choosing two or three topics and a modest weekly routine.
2. Communication with families and students. Read the district’s policy first, and prefer channels the school manages, which let the district see and support the communication.
3. Student use inside lessons. Check the state and district phone rule, then ask whether a school-managed tool can do the same job. Where the answer is yes, the lesson avoids the phone-policy question entirely.

Teachers who want guidance on student conduct online can turn to edCircuit’s digital citizenship guide and, for the learning side, the professional development guide.

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