Why Social Media is Changing Higher Education: The Innovative Educator is Using Google plus to Reach His Students

Becoming and being an innovative educator means educators have to learn new things everywhere and every time. There is no limitation for learning; in the class, outside the class, through students, colleagues, even from their friends who are not educators. Every educator is always a new educator because time passes and when we see the new students every year, we realize that the techniques we have been using for years are not valid any more, and we have to add something to us which will then be called experience and through that way an educator becomes an educator who is always incomplete. In this paper we analyze how educators can use social media in higher education to become effective and innovative educators, focusing on the possibilities Google+ offers to them. We designed different bachelor and master courses for several programs, included Google+ functionalities, and compared educator activities and students' course performance with results from former course, following traditional teaching methods. Apart from that we used Google+ functionalities for course overlapping activities. The results of this forthcoming analysis show that Google+ contributes to use new ways of educator-student, educator-educator communication, increase course sustainability and cross-course information exchange and communication.Hong Kong Educ Soc; Singapore Management & Sports Sci Ins