Social Networking

Social Networks have seen a huge explosion over recent years. Many of our students are on Facebook and are more than familiar at using these tools to develop and extend their own networks. Educators have seen this rise in Social Networking amongst their student bodies and have looked at how they can use them to benefit education. The different ways in which educators are using Social Networks is growing all the time.


Currently, my Social Networks consist of Twitter, Technology Integration Ning, Classroom 2.0 Ning, Educators 2.0 Ning, Facebook and Google Plus. They are all valuable and offer benefits to many areas of my life, learning and development. 


Google+ has got me excited and is the network I am most interested in developing. The main thing I like about Google+ is the idea of circles and being able to decide which of my circle/groups see which of my feeds. I have separate circles for educators, family and friends outside of education. I can easily filter which information goes to each group. This feature allows me great control over the types of information i am releasing. The Huddle is another area I can see benefitting educators. Huddles allow multiple groups to video conference. In terms of collaboration I can see this having a huge impact. 


Although there has been resistance, in some schools, to students using Social Networking as part of their educational tool kit, I feel that schools must start to open up. When we examine how many of our students are using these networks, it would be verging on naive not to use them in the classroom.