As I began formulating my stance on social networking in schools, I began to think of all of the positive effects of the use of social networks in both the classroom and in the media center. Most students use some type of social networking site several times each week in order to communicate with their classmates and family members. Therefore, most students already know how to use social networking sites. As I am teaching my students, I sometimes struggle engaging them in every lesson and activity in the classroom. However, I believe that the use of social networking sites would help to increase student interest in classroom projects and assignments. While I know that social networking sites could not be used all the time, I believe it would be beneficial for teachers and students to have access to these types of sites when needed in order to help improve instruction and student learning.
Even though I believe social networking would be beneficial for instruction, every type of social networking site is blocked for every school in our school system. This was proven true today during a meeting with our academic coach. Our academic coach needed to use Teacher Tube to show us a video to help further explain her topic for the meeting, standards based classroom. However, she was unable to access that website because it was blocked. During the meeting, she spoke with our technology director and he explained to her that all social networking sites are blocked across the county and they will not allow access to the sites. Needless to say our academic coach was very disappointed and also frustrated. Access to social networking sites would have benefited the teachers in our meeting today and I believe access to social networking sites would benefit our students on a daily basis.
While I understand that there can be negative aspects to social networking sites, such as access to inappropriate material, I also believe that the students can be taught how to use social networking sites properly. Students need to be taught by teachers how to safely search the Internet and to use social networking sites. Not only would the students have the benefits of using social networking sites, the students would also learn how to safely use the Internet to help to improve their learning.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
While reading your post, and hearing your frustration between the lines, I thought about the site that I've been using lately and that I wrote about in an earlier blog (Group 8). Glogster is a site where users design an electronic poster. (One of our classmates wrote a "Tech Tip" on this site early on.) The site has a social networking aspect to it--commenting on glogs or writing messages to other glogsters. I'm bringing it up here again to say that the developers have a separate site for the use of educators (www.edu.glogsters.com) for the reason that you have mentioned here in your blog--decreasing the possibility of the student accessing inappropriate material. I really respect these developers for going this route, i.e., establishing a separate site for teachers and their students. I wish that other social networking sites would follow suit.
ReplyDeleteSocial Networking is a valuable tool and you are absolutely right in that students use them sometimes on a daily basis. We are missing out on using this technology to engage our students. In my other class we are learning about project-based learning, and a lot of the ideas are great but I know that I could not use them at my school because of “BESS the Blocker”! (That’s our pet name of the internet filtering system) I find myself searching the web at home and finding useful resources only to get to work and find the site blocked! While I understand completely the need to block student access from certain sites, I think that teachers and students alike would find access to some social networking beneficial to the learning experience.
ReplyDelete