Week 6 Social Networking

Reflect on current social networking technologies and how they might be used for educational purposes.  You can also outline some concerns you have with these technologies.

When I think about the different social networking technologies and how they are being used for educational purposes, I think about our learning management system (LMS) that we use at our school, titled Schoology.  We decided as a school last year that it was time to invest in a program that would allow our entire community to keep up with communication.  Schoology was chosen because it resembles Facebook and as a school we decided that the similarity would ensure that the students would use the program and it has worked. 

Another way that we ensured that students would use Schoology was that the teachers are required to post their daily homework on Schoology.  This means that students who are absent or not paying much attention in class can still have a place that they can access their assignments.  Course syllabii are listed and classroom attendance is kept on Schoology.  Teachers also post the student's grades there.  Each parent is given their own Schoology account that allows them to also have some access to their students progress and assignments.  There are different groups that can be made for communication purposes so if a student is involved in a club and the school newspaper then if they log in to their Schoology account they have one place that all of the information that they need that relates to school is posted right there for them.  Homeroom teachers create groups to keep in touch with students the athletic coaches also form groups in Schoology to remind students of practices and other important events.

The school calendar is posted on Schoology and helps keep our school community in line.  We still have a school website that gives the outside world a look at who we are as a school community but for our internal communications we rely on Schoology.

Once of the drawbacks to Schoology and that we have worked around is that the outside world can not contact our students through this program because it is closed to our school community.  This means that if a college is attempting to contact students that they need a separate email address and there are times that the school would need to communicate with students or faculty and Schoology may not be running so email is the next best thing.  We use Gmail and make sure that each student and faculty member has their own gmail.com account for these purposes when outsiders need to contact us about school business.  The combination of Schoology and Gmail has really worked well and while the students don't all use or check their school email account they do all check in on Schoology.