Social networking sites have blown up over the last 10 years. I can distinctly remember sitting in my best friend’s dorm room freshman year when she first told me about this new thing called “The Facebook.” The idea was so incredibly foreign to me as I had not gotten into the whole Myspace thing. As more people begin using Facebook, it is amazing to see the connections that can be made. My own mother now has over 200 friends!
With all that being said, I personally do not feel completely comfortable with social networks in educational settings, in particular Facebook. Facebook to me provides too many distractions. I am in graduate school and I still find myself procrastinating on my course work to check out what is going on in the Facebook world. There are many other sites that will allow social interactions, blogging and commenting without all of the outside distractions. Edmodo is a great example of such a tool. Edmodo is essentially a Facebook for education. It has the appearance of Facebook with more security and control. Through Edmodo, students can not only interact with their classmates but they can also collaborate with students all over the world.
Twitter is a brand new tool for me. As I have only just joined Twitter in order to collaborate with my group mates on our group wiki, I have only just begun to explore the possibilities that can be provided through Twitter. My group started out by leaving comments back and forth on our actual Wiki, highlighting new posts so that they would stand out. I believe it was Dana that suggested that we move our conversation to Twitter. I found Twitter to be extremely user friendly and easy to carry out conversations, post information and add links. My concern for the middle and high school educational settings is all of the other information that is out there on that Web 2.0 tool. I feel that my group mates were extremely motivated, self-disciplined people who most likely did not get carried away looking at what DeSean Jackson or Kim Kardashian had to tweet. I do not feel confident that I could say the same about my students.
