Rebecca Potterfield's List: Social Networking

• A new survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% of admissions officers acknowledged looking at social-networking sites to evaluate applicants. Of those colleges making use of the online information, 38% said that what they saw "negatively affected" their views of the applicant. Only a quarter of the schools checking the sites said their views were improved, according to the survey by education company Kaplan, a unit of Washington Post Co.

• The study of more than 1,200 students found that 96 percent of those with online access had used social-networking technology—including text messaging—and 81 percent said they had visited a social-networking Web site at least once within the three months before the study was conducted.
• Establish a policy for dealing with incidents in which students break school rules and their inappropriate behavior is showcased publicly on social-networking sites.
• Outline clear guidelines for administrators that spell out how schools should discipline students based on information garnered from social-networking sites, and let parents and students know about those rules.
• “Does a school’s authority reach out to that wacky party on Saturday night that was documented by cellphones?”
• Educate students about online-safety issues and how to use sites such as Facebook and MySpace responsibly.
• Have a policy in place for dealing with cyber bullying.
• If teachers are using social-networking sites for educational purposes, they should establish clear guidelines for how they intend to communicate with students via those sites.
• Policies are still developing, and legal issues surrounding social-networking sites have not been settled.

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• While many teens post their first name and photos on their profiles, they rarely post information on public profiles they believe would help strangers actually locate them such as their full name, home phone number or cell phone number.
• nearly two-thirds of teens with profiles (63%) believe that a motivated person could eventually identify them
• how teens, particularly those with profiles online, make decisions about disclosing or shielding personal information.

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• TIGed (www.tiged.org) is an international community of globally minded educators, a database of global education resources, and a suite of online classrooms designed especially for teachers. Currently, the TIGed community comprises more than 2,500 teachers at more than 1,000 schools in 71 countries.
• individual young leaders can create groups and projects, blog, share resources, participate in projects with nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and other partners, learn about events and opportunities, engage in public policy processes, and more.
• TIGed is a user-friendly, Web 2.0 platform, with the kinds of project-based learning initiatives and practical tools that teachers can use.
• Using TIGed, teachers can create virtual classrooms with the student safety and learning management features they need. Teachers choose which tools to integrate into their virtual classrooms based on what is most appropriate for their students, learning objectives, and projects. Available tools include blogs, podcasts, maps, digital-image galleries, interactive discussion boards, live video chat, guest speaker access, online file space, and more. Bookmarks can be imported from TIG or the social bookmarking tool Delicious directly into TIGed classrooms. A class-videos feature enables teachers to feed YouTube, TeacherTube, or other online video service accounts into their classrooms.

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• TIGed combines blogs, podcasts, photo sharing, mapping tools, and live and asynchronous discussion tools with TakingITGlobal.org’s thriving community of 125,000 young global leaders. The presentation will be appropriate for those who are new to TIGed, or new to social networking altogether.
• TakingITGlobal.org is free–and while it is geared toward individual youth, there are some really good examples of how teachers have used it (including Robert Karulas’ upcoming presentation on podcasting.) We developed TIGed (which is not free–although you have free access through this conference) to help better suit some of the needs of the education market.
• Thematic classrooms–classrooms that we’ve loaded with content on different topics, in partnership with some really cool organizations like Global Kids, are free and provide you access to the same toolset is a ‘normal’ TIGed membership (without the ability to create your own classrooms from scratch).

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• Recent efforts to outlaw the Web 2.0 sites so beloved by teenagers include a congressional bill that would throttle funds to schools that do not restrict access. But Elgg, open-source social networking software developed at the University of Brighton, has been designed specifically with academic uses in mind.
• Broadly, Elgg represents a shift from aging, top-down classroom technologies like Blackboard to what e-learning practitioners call personal learning environments -- mashup spaces comprising del.icio.us feeds, blog posts, podcast widgets -- whatever resources students need to document, consume or communicate their learning across disciplines.

• What's this all about?

   

  TakingITGlobal's mission is to empower youth to understand and act on the world's greatest challenges. We can't wait for you to get involved!

• The Kindersite has 1,000s   of links to the best games, songs and stories for young children.
• The Kindersite is designed   for kinder, child-care, preschool, kindergartens, elementary,   primary schools and Special needs plus homeschool, libraries   and the home.
• Your   childs safety is our foremost   concern, every link and site that the Kindersite uses has   been checked as conforming to Department of Children, Schools   and Families (UK) guidelines for safe sites for children.

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• Not only have many schools enacted policies restricting teacher/student interaction, because most schools have banned most sites students use to communicate they do their best to prevent students from using these tools to communicate in an educational setting. It is unfortunate that in the 21st century many schools have deemed adolescent socialization among each other or with their teachers as inappropriate.