Using Yammer in a High School Mathematics Classroom

Since the origin of social media, our society has continued to use these technologies in new and different ways as our world evolves. Lately, these resources have become normalized in the educational setting and have been appearing more and more in the classroom.  

If you have read some of my other Blogs or Discussion Posts, you will know that I am no longer a public school teacher, but now work for a large retail company as an Instructional Designer.  This topic was interesting for me because on the Learning and Development Team we use social media to interact and communicate with our 300 stores and their team members.  We use the Mircosoft platform called Yammer which integrates nicely with all the other Microsoft products that we use as a company.  Yammer is used to communicate messages, pictures or videos to a targeted group of people.  Some of the specific reasons that our company likes to use Yammer is to communicate a competition, or to give shout outs to exceptional team members. 

Yammer would make a great addition to any classroom.  This would really be ideal for any school setting that uses Outlook instead of Google, I realize that many schools choose to use Google. It is a nice platform because you could create groups for each of your classes and contain their interaction to only their class members or other classes of the same content area.  Then you could also choose to add external accounts for specific parents or guardians if appropriate. Yammer can be used to praise your students for a great achievement or to shout someone out who is doing their best!  Yammer can also be used as an informational hub for homework assignments or upcoming important dates in your classroom.  

While I have only used Yammer in the corporate setting, I think that there are plenty of features that would lend themselves nicely to a high school mathematics classroom! 

Sources: 

20 benefits of social media for students in 2022. Kiiky. (2022, July 15). Retrieved November 23, 2022, from https://kiiky.com/how-social-media-benefits-students/ 

Office 365 for Education. Microsoft Partners in Learning. (n.d.). Retrieved November 26, 2022, from https://www.schoolnet.org.za/PILP/office365/yammer2-20ways.html 

Shah, S. (2016, May 14). The history of Social Media. Digital Trends. Retrieved November 23, 2022, from https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/the-history-of-social-networking/