Whenever I think about social networking in school, I think about the issues that it causes daily in our classrooms. I think about the girl who comes to me crying because another person wrote horrible things about her on Facebook. I think about the student who feels left out because he or she was not invited to a friend's house and everyone else was invited. These are my first thoughts when I think about social networking in education.
For this assignment, I had to take a step back and really think about social networking. How could this be used in the classroom?? One way is to have students create profiles about a character in a novel that they are reading. I read about a site that you can create fake profiles that resemble a Facebook profile. I believe this would be one way for students to demonstrate their understanding of the character and then they could share them with others. Another thing teachers could do would be to post journal questions and students would be able to answer the question on the teacher's Facebook wall. This would give the teacher and all students the opportunties to participate in the discussion. I know several teachers who post journal questions to their blog and then have students comment.
I believe that in order to use Facebook we would have many hurdles to jump in trying to justify its use. The first hurdle would be allowing Facebook to be accessed through the school firewalls. The other issue that we have is that not all students are allowed to have Facebooks. I am uncomfortable with allowing students to have access to my Facebook so if I was to use Facebook in my classroom I would create two separate accounts. I would also want to make sure that parents are aware of how and why we were using Facebook.
Kelly, I like the idea of creating a Fake Facebook profile of a character....I have also seen teachers have their students create a status update of a character (like a Tweet)....all the important info in 140 characters or less
ReplyDeleteThanks Joanna! We just completed an activity in reading class where students had to write a text from one character in their novel to another character in their novel. They could use text language and no more than 160 characters. They loved it! I like the idea of making a Tweet as well and I will have to share that with the reading teacher. We might have to try that for our next writing activity with this book.
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