Social Networking in Schools

Social Networking in Schools

Last week my fellow peer Melissa Gray wrote an interesting blog post about her thoughts on social networking sites and the advantages and disadvantages of their use in schools. Her reflection was inspired by an article, which appeared in the sun herald, which you can read here:

Melissa made many interesting points about why she believes social networking sites should be taught and permitted in schools. I found that I thoroughly agreed with Melissa on this issue as so I thought I would list some reasons why I believe social networking sites should be allowed in schools. These include:

* They can be incorporated into lessons or provide a fun way for children to play if they have spare time. E.g. Twitter could be used in an English lesson or as a fun extra time activity. An example of one twitter game is writing a story through twitter, where each child has to use the 160-character word limit to write a part of a story, which the next child continues on. This activity would be great for English in story telling and also for a creative writing activity.

* Social networking sites such as twitter could be used to update parents about what is going on in their child’s classroom, or update them whilst children are on excursions and remind them of specific dates coming up e.g. mufti days. So it would be a direct and live link between the classroom and the student’s parents.

* Social networking sites can provide a place for students to help each other with homework or study together before a test. E.g. Year 6 could have a facebook page and all the students could post comments if they were having trouble with their homework and the students could work together to work out the answers.

  

Image Source: Hamm, M. (2008) Jump on the social media bandwagon [photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/73532212@N00/2945559128