Networks on the Web, Professional and Social - Module 9

In the front there are cocoa dusted dark chocolate truffles with a ganache centre, in the background (barely visible) are marzipan and date truffles dipped in dark chocolate - these have been a family tradition for Christmas for as long as I can remember :)

With the explosion in popularity of Facebook came the delicate issues of privacy, cyber bullying and  duty of care. I strongly believe that there needs to be boundaries between the social and professional lives of teachers and students and therefore fully back moves by the CEO to ban all Facebook correspondence between students and teachers. I recognise that Facebook is a communication tool that is familiar to students, however there are other tools, such as Edmodo, which are very similar to Facebook and allow parental access. The parental access negates any concerns about the content or conversations that students and teachers may engage in. Additionally, I regularly monitor the account that I have set up for my year 11 students, ensuring that all communication is appropriate. The process is transparent, the students know they are being monitored, the parents are comfortable and teachers know that false accusations cannot be made - while easily making available electronic resources such as work booklets (students can the download and print these themselves, thus reducing paper usage at school) and YouTube links. Finally, we must educate our students as to why sites such as Facebook are inappropriate in the classroom, not simply ignore their questions. We have a responsibility to teach them that some behaviours can be considered distracting and prdatory

Collaboration tools such as Wikis are a great way to ensure that students share questions, notes, links etc. on syllabus material. In fact, we frequently use WetPaint in biology. It is difficult to navigate through at first (leading to some students not wanting to use it) but I persisted and now I am seeing all the benefits, especially the chance for students to collaboratively create study notes.

I have not had a chance to use Scootle, but reflections from other teachers lead me to believe that the program is somewhat restrictive, with many teachers opting to not use it anymore.

I think that online communities are an excellent concept for the classroom  but teachers must be vigilant to the potential problems that could arise because it is new, and we are still navigating our way through. Furthermore, we need to make the distinction bewteen social networking and online communities very clear.