Because I am a member of Facebook, along with my husband and oldest son, I see advantages and disadvantages with using them in schools. I thoroughly enjoyed the reading this week, as it gave me new considerations to think about concerning this neat tool. Let me also mention that I am not in the school system now. My Facebook account is a personal account and I use it for connecting with friends and for posting photos and links that I find interesting. I would say that I am a marginal user---I check it daily, but do not post my “goings on” every day. Many of my out of state friends, high school and college friends have joined Facebook in the past year and I have enjoyed “seeing” them again!
The main reason that I was drawn to FB as a social tool was because my high school son was using it quite often and it made me nervous. During a class last summer, we were asked to do instructional learning modules for teachers for 3 pieces of technology and I chose FB as one of these tools. I started my account and learned all that I could about its instructional purposes before I started using it as a social networking tool. I was surprised at how much I liked it and how much I thought (and still think) that it could benefit the classroom. I was very interested in the interview with Danah Boyd in School Library Journal in which she found that students use these sites for connecting with friends, not for meeting new people. This has certainly been my experience. I also believe that she is right on about the need for librarians to promote and know the difference between old media and new media. We can also provide for guidance in the use of these services.
The use of these social networking sites for classroom activities has fascinated me but after reading about the use of blocking these sites at school, there may be no way to really embrace their use for now. One of the activities that I used on my learning module was the use of groups to promote understanding of classroom topics. You can set the groups to be by invitation only so that only your classes can view the questions or materials that you post there. You can put pictures, links to readings or music, many resources to connect with the classroom material. One idea mentioned in the reading was that students could make FB pages for characters in literature---how cool is that?!
The resources that were made available this week in the way of promoting ethical and safe use of social networking sites were tremendous! I bookmarked almost all of them because I do feel a responsibility to teach this information to not only students and teachers, but to provide this to parents. I think that by using these resources in a positive way, we as media specialists can help de-bunk some of the myths related to these sites. One of the statistics provided by the Pew Institute in the reading was the 55% of all 14-18 year olds are using these social networking sites. It is my strong belief that we need to know them, use them and teach about them in our 21st century media centers.
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I too use Facebook on a daily basis for personal use. I use it to mainly to connect with oold high school friends, friends living in other cities, and family in other cities. I am interested to see how a media center might create a facebook page to "celebrate" its program as our textbook stated. Howver, I am a little weary of this. I am still a little scared of ill willed students being able to post things.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you said about teaching student safety on the web. I too bookmarked most of the sites for future use. I could see teaching a web safety course at the beginning of the school year along with the introduction to the media center.
I liked the idea of creating FB pages of literary characters. That is such a creative idea! I never knew there were so many uses for social networking sites in the media center and school. My children use Facebook and that is the only reason I've ever even looked at it. But now, I am interested in learning more about it.
ReplyDeleteI liked the security tips that were presented in some of our readings too. I already teach Internet safety and ethical skills with my research lessons, but if students are allowed to use social networking at school, there are even more skills they need to learn.
I just joined facebook this weekend, and I was impressed at how it connected with the e-mail address I gave when subscribing and then asked me if I want to add them as friends on my page. That is very convenient. I guess I am to early in the game to comment on its cons. I can say that I am more comfortable with students using Facebook then I am with MySpace becase by design, MySpace seems to invite more undesireables. In any case, if we allow children to network we must do it with caution. This means both teachers and parents monitoring student activity.
ReplyDeleteMy county does not allow any of the social networking sites - no Facebook, no MySpace, nothing. I do like the point that you bring up about informing students and parents alike about safeguards to put in place when utilizing these tools. Even if students aren't using them at school, I feel that I still have a responsibility to teach them to use technology in a safe manner. Therefore, I would probably have a class on social networking safety with students in high school and probably middle school. I would place links on my media web page for parents to read up on the latest.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post...I hadn't really put much thought into teaching students about this since we can't use it within the classroom. However, after reading your thoughts, I realize that I really should include the safety aspect in my instruction regardless!