social+networking

A social networking site is a website that provides a virtual community in which people with a shared interest may communicate, collaborate and share information. Some examples for adults are MySpace, Facebook, Bebo etc - but there are some excellent kid-friendly ones that will better prepare our students for using these other sites wisely!
 * What are Social Networking Sites?**

How can I use a Social Networking site in my class?

 * Use it as an opportunity to explicitly teach students about their responsibilities surrounding privacy, 'netiquette', copyright and plagiarism within a highly moderated and supportive environment
 * Use the blogging tools contained within to motivate students to write for an authentic audience
 * Allow students to make contacts all over the world and communicate with them
 * Support students to select appropriate multimedia files to upload to the web, educating them about considerations/consequences

Where can I see what they look like?
provides a unified workspace for file sharing, document collaboration, and project management with easy-to-use interface.
 * [|Imbee tour]
 * [|MySpace], [|Facebook] and [|Ning].
 * [|Twitter]
 * [|Shareflow]
 * [|Ubidesk]

How can I get started?
Twitter, how a little bit of creativity can make this tool genuinely useful. //[|Can we use Twitter for educational activities?]// //Twitter is the most popular microblogging application, with almost one million users called twitterers, who can send and receive messages via the web, SMS, instant messaging clients, and by third party applications. Posts are limited to 140 text characters in length.

I’m also convinced that it can be useful in the classroom if a feed is projected during a lecture or activity. If it can avoid becoming a distraction, then all students need to do is add a search tag (precede a given word with a #) and all “tweets” containing that search tag can be highlighted and projected using a tool like [|TweetDeck]. Questions for the teacher? Comments on the subject matter? Answer a quick poll in class without the expense of interactive response systems? All of these can be done with Twitter. I’ve used it to facilitate collaboration on projects, group discussion, sharing links, and even keeping track of students during field trips. Which brings us back to a [|CNN article]. CNN featured a surgeon whose chief resident live-Tweeted a tumor removal to document a new procedure. Not only was this a really novel way of disseminating information, but it was an invaluable service to families and loved ones who could monitor the progress of the surgery. Twitter (and services like it) represent a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. We’re doing our students a disservice by excluding it from the classroom. It’s free; we just need to find the best ways to harness its power while limiting the possibility for distraction.// Ed ZDNET- blog

|| [|Imbee] is a free online social networking site especially for youngsters. It is extremely highly moderated. Children are not able to sign themselves up. Parents or teachers must do this for them, and to ensure that you are a parent/teacher when you say you are, the Imbee team will actually call you on the telephone (from the US!) to verify your drivers license number!!

Once signed up, students are able to: - Write in a blog - Upload audio and video (if approved by the teacher) - Add friends (if approved) - Create and join groups (if approved) - Create and respond to opinion surveys (if approved)


 * [|Sign up to Imbee]
 * [|Learn more about Imbee] ||