Social Networking

5-4 Blog: Social Networking

Positive Impacts:

Social networking helps the world connect easily and helps people share their ideas quite easily. The sharing component is very important in education because students can share their ideas not only with their friends but also with others throughout the world. This will result in mixed array of contributors that can provide helpful insight, just like a PLN for teachers; peer insight might mean more to students. Social networking provides speedy communication which teachers can use to have students contribute and discuss topics within the classroom. Social networking also helps people find other who share the same ideas or interest.

Ten Ways Schools Are Using Social Media Effectively- This article points out many effective ways are using social media in education. Some of the examples provided are assessments, providing and gaining feedback. Some more effective uses are online learning and parent communication.

Negative Impacts:

Some of the negative impacts of social networking are lack of privacy, isolation and psychological impacts. Students share too much information on social networking sites without having a second thought about how this might impact them in a later point in life. Students also forget or don’t know that what they share may never be able to be taken down and might also be used by strangers or even the site itself. This is also true about some educators who need to be careful of what they share because students will see it. Teachers need be careful because students can use personal information in a way that could affect the teacher/ student relationship negatively. People are being sucked up in social networking so much that all they do is share every aspect of their lives and react by what others post about them, making them seek out attention from others in social media sites.

Here is some feedback from the younger generation:

My point of view:

If used correctly social networking helps students and teachers connect by helping teachers meet students halfway with a tool that makes them feel comfortable using. Also students need to have better training and role modeling of using social networking correctly. This provides teachers the opportunity to help students in this aspect. Schools shouldn’t reject social media altogether but instead create a protocol to protect their students and teachers while using social media in the schools. Also properly train teachers so they can in turn properly educate students.