Online Activities and Social Networking

All teachers should be encouraged to create online activities for their students because this is a way of meeting students where they are. Students are already using the internet for personal interests all the time. As teachers, we can tap into an interest that is already strong, and use that interest to develop engaging lessons. From the experiences of online schools, there is much that can be applied to online activities in the traditional classroom. First, online courses have shown that, “some students feel safer expressing themselves online” (November 2010, p. 88). For students who are not comfortable speaking out in class, an online activity would provide a safe space for speaking their minds. The perceived anonymity of the web and the allowance for time to respond allows students a comfort level to freely express themselves without fear of ridicule from their peers. (November 2010) Second, the online courses serve to provide collaborative learning opportunities. The students feel that, “they are all in it together” (November 2010, p. 89). The students work together in ways that would be more difficult in a face-to-face classroom. Students can be paired up to perform an activity based around the internet; having to work together to negotiate the activity and complete the task. Having to work together to solve a problem informs an atmosphere of cooperation and joint problem-solving that is empowering to the students and to the classroom as a whole.
Twenty first century learning need not be hampered by social networking; teachers do not need to fear that students in the classroom are using social networking sites instead of learning. Instead, teachers can use social networking sites to facilitate learning. Will Richardson (2010) sees social networking sites as the means by which, “we’re willing to share our ideas and resources with the network for its betterment, because we get back just as much if not more” (p.85). I see social networking used in classrooms as a means of collaborative student and teacher space. As we use Facebook to connect with out network of friends, classrooms can use social networking to connect classmates to each other and to their teacher. Richardson (2010) sees this space as stressing, ”cooperation, interactivity, mutual benefit and social engagement” (p. 133). The great thing for students, then, is this space is personalized, published and involves reading, writing, exchanging ideas and sharing thoughts. For students, this covers a great deal of the literacies that we want them to acquire: digital literacy, social literacy, reading and writing literacies, and so on. The vision is that schools will realize that we must capitalize on the technologies that students are already using and that they want to use to enable a comfortable and successful learning environment.

References
November, A. (2010). Empowering Students with Technology.
Thousand Oaks: Corwin
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other
Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks:
Corwin