Social Networking in the Classroom

This is a hot topic, and one that I can see both side of the coin for. I looked at the Terms of Service for the following 4 sites: facebook, Delicious, Twitter, and Picasa. For each of these I found the ownership issue to be fairly clear. In the case of Google for Picasa, it was very clear that Google does not claim ownership or copyright to any photos the user uploads, but in the case of facebook, while they did not claim ‘ownership’ they claimed the right to use any content that has been uploaded. They do mention that they use the content to provide information to advertisers.

How does this apply to my students? The evolving world of the Internet offers teachers and students incredible access to new tools to research, learn, and create, but with this access comes some fear. Based on the age of my students, if I was to embrace networking in my classroom, I would need to do a bit of research before I chose which sites to work with. Although, the fears and worries would not cause me to say no to social networking in the classroom. Possibly it is my location that gets me excited about this prospect. As a teacher in a fairly small, rural setting, the ability to reach beyond the scope of our classroom, town, and district to connect kids with other learners is very exciting.

One of the issue that seems to come up, is how to keep students from wasting their time simply chatting on the sites. For me, this is really a non-issue. I don’t see this being much different than how we deal with the students zoning out or writing notes in our f2f classroom. You teach! It would take the same level of enthusiasm to keep them captivated on the lesson, and this is something teachers have to deal with on a daily basis already. I do love the idea of the increased collaboration and different formats for students to work together. I can really see this being effective in a creative writing unit.

I do feel that prior to any class involvement in a social networking activity, a media awareness unit must be taught and then revisited consistently. Hopefully, we are doing this in our classrooms already, without using social networking. Even just to teach our students how to filter through the content on the web. Before I have my students use the internet for research, we do a fun activity that uses REAL as a means to evaluate a website. Since I have not used any social networking tools in my classroom, at this stage, I am only having discussions with them about what the impacts are of what they put online. Some classmates have had some incredible ideas of things they have done or seen in the classroom to teach students the implications of their online actions. This type of awareness should be part of our day-to-day teaching, even if we are not using social networking sites with our kids.