While social media use has become nearly ubiquitous, there have been few efforts to study how teacher educators prepare their students to responsibly use and teach about social media. This study analyzes 71 students' survey data, reflections, and class activities from education courses across three universities to better understand the successes and shortcomings of social media experiences. Shortcomings included defects in course organization and facilitation, mismatches between instructors and students' expectations or preferred uses, and pre-service teachers' generally narrow visions of how social media might be leveraged educationally in their future classrooms. Successes of social media uses included positive effects on relationships, benefits from affordances of social media, and intriguing visions for future social media use by several students. We conclude by drawing on John Dewey's theory of experience to propose a model by which educators might glean insights into ways to foster educative social media experiences.