Friday, July 25, 2008
Journal Four: Social Networking
Social networking is when a group of individuals form an online community that shares a common interest, such as hobbies, politics and or the like. In this community, members can converse with each other, collaborate, share photos, documents, and ideas with one another, meet new people, and perform various other similar activities. Examples of social networking websites are Myspace.com and Facebook.com. With regards to education, this technology can be very useful for teachers on the small scale to collaborate with other educators at their school or district, or on a large scale enabling educators to come together with others from all over the globe. On Classroom 2.0, I followed a discussion about starting a Ning network for the faculty at one’s school. It turns out that many of the people trying to engage their faculties with social networking are having a hard time getting things rolling. Most of the posts included tips to try and make the sites more interactive and appealing so that members will want to participate and collaborate. In another discussion that I followed one person asked which social networking sites have been working the best for people. Many of the posts gave which sites that they have tried and which sites have allowed them the most success in creating a social network at their schools. Many gave Ning as one site, but others are also using Facebook, Carmun, Intodit, and others as a way of creating online social networking communities for their fellow teachers and students.
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6 comments:
Social networking is an excellent way to reach out and expand your learning experience. I think people are a little timid when it comes to using that for an educational purpose because you can get so side tracked (for example facebook or myspace). From reading your journal entry, it seems like they are making great strides in creating an educational social network to be a positive one.
I feel our future is headed more towards the use of technology like social networking so we need to work together in order to find useful ways for educators to get on board! However in general I agree with Kelcie that it is a great way to reach out and expand the learning experience across the globe (beyond boundaries) because learning about diversity and different cultures would be so much more entertaining and educational by discussing with someone personally living in that specific culture. But we do need to be careful because yes students can and will get distracted with interesting sites like facebook and myspace but it also is about a safety issue having students online and need to make sure we set boundaries for access to the programs.
I agree that social networking is a great avenue with which to communicate with others and expand the learning process for all involved. However, I never actually utilized a program such as this, so you will have to keep people like me in mind, and convince us to take part in the coolness.
Social networking is a great way to reach out for the people who are not timid. If you are person who need advice then this is a great why to get information. I do not know if I would use social networking in the future yet. However it is good idea.
I am planning on using a social networking tool when I am an educator. I think it's great to get new ideas and find lesson plans that you would not have access to otherwise. I agree that it might be a little time consuming to browse through everything that is out there, but I think if you look in the right places you will be able to implement your findings successfully.
Using Social Networking as a way for teachers to collaborate is a great idea. It will provide much needed flexibility for teachers to 'get together' regarding such concepts as teaching across the curriculum. Hopefully, this idea will be more widely accepted by teachers.
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