By giving students a chance to use social networking sites in school, teachers can help students learn to be safe and smart when using these tools. In a classroom setting, students learn how to use critical thinking in order to make good decisions about what social network sites they use and how they communicate within those environments. There are opportunities to expand student learning and facilitate collaboration and content creation.

There are many examples of student and teacher use of social networking as a teaching and learning tool. For example:

• A student created a MySpace profile for William Shakespeare. By creating this space the student was able to write about Shakespeare and his works in a format that was interesting and comfortable.
• Students take lyrics from their favorite songs and paste them into Wordle. The visual word cloud results provide students with the chance to analyze the language of the song and discuss the meaning of the lyrics.
• Students use Google Docs as a way to collaborate with classmates on writing assignments. No matter where the students are – classroom, public library, or home – they can access the document and work on it in real-time with their classroom partners.

A good place to learn more about social networking in teaching and learning is Classroom 2.0 a social network designed specifically for teachers.

 What is a blog? If you have an email account, you can set up your own blog. Edublogs and Google’s Blogger are options.

 Social Networking 101A (handout)