Social Networking Sites
A lot of teachers are against using social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and/or Twitter. However, I think that these sites can be a tremendous asset to the classroom if used properly. For example, Twitter could be used to send out tweets to students about homework assignments, study tips, or general classroom reminders. There seems to be more of a shift in high school away from MySpace towards Facebook, but both social networking sites have great potential. I have a professional account on Facebook that I use to communicate with former and current students, parents, and my own family. Through Facebook, I am part of the Robert Noyce Scholars group, which is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation that seeks to encourage talented science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors and professionals to become K-12 mathematics and science teacher through an open forum and collaborative efforts using this social networking site. You could even create a group on Facebook for each class that you teach to send out reminders, host on-line study sessions, and use the blogging features of Facebook.
Wikis
I never actually knew what a wiki was until this week. I didn't even put together the "wiki" in Wikipedia! But Wikipedia is a great example of a wiki, an interlinked site shared and edited by multiple users. We created a secondary science wiki for science teachers in secondary education in TPTE 486 using PBworks and really started using it today. I've never used a wiki before and I like the concept, but dislike that anyone can edit anything on the wiki. What happens if I had the correct information (or I liked the way the formatting looked) and someone else in the wiki disagreed? I could see this going back and forth with changes, almost a struggle for power. We did add annotated links to the websites we evaluated today (see my earlier post), and will continue to update our wiki throughout the rest of this summer session. It is funny though because we have a wiki for secondary science, yet in our section all three of us are looking up three different topics (chemistry, physics, and forensic science). They are all inter-related, yet completely different curricula.
Final Thoughts?
I can definitely see myself continuing to use the latest social networking site in my teaching - if students are using it all the time, why not communicate on their level? It was very easy to create a Facebook account when I originally made one. I didn't actually create the wiki, but it was very easy to join it once the secondary science wiki was created. I can't imagine it would be that hard to make one myself on PBworks. I'd really like to start using Twitter, but right now I don't know a lot of students that are tweeting or would want to read my tweets about science class.
I'm not sure that I'll really use wikis outside of TPTE 486 in a classroom setting due to time constraints to actually teach the kids HOW to use a wiki, but I may or may not use it in my personal life. That one is more up in the air for me than the social networking sites. Besides, Rome wasn't built in a day, so I probably won't start using ALL of the different forms of technology at once!
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