Thing #18

Well I have both a Facebook account and a Twitter account. Now while I am on facebook pretty much everyday I do not use Twitter in the same way. I have actually recently decided to distance myself from facebook because I have begun to realize just how much I actually use it on a daily basis. I have already started following some teachers and educational based people on twitter and am excited to get information from their posts.

It is important for educators to know how Social Networking works so that they will be able to keep up with the times. This will allowing teachers to be able to communicate in so many different ways with their students. It will also provide different ways of understanding their students. To understand how the social networking sites are run and work teachers will be able use this to reach and get their students to work in the classroom. I really did not learn anything new about these sites since I have been using them for sometime now. This is not to say that I will never learn anything new from these sites, things are always changing and we learn new things all the time. I really like how it is so easy on both site to stay connected to people and how easily it is to keep everything to yourself by only sharing with certain people. On both sites it is easy to customize your profile and set it to private. I really think that Facebook is most useful in the long run. With twitter you can only share so much and communicate with people. With Facebook you can share more at once and the layout lets you share more than just words or a short link. I really do not think that either of these sites should be used in the classroom. The experiences I have had with these sites have been great and I will continue to use them but not in my classroom. Facebook is only a distraction from what needs to be done. I often find myself on Facebook for too long when I should be doing school work or something else that is productive. By bringing either of these sites into the classroom we are just asking for failure from our students. We all know how easily students are distracted and Facebook and Twitter would just make that distraction worse. All of these reasons do not even touch on what else could be seen on these sites when it should be time for school work.

Facebook and Twitter have their place in the world but that is not in the classroom.