Thing #18

I thoroughly enjoyed writing about this "thing" on social networking. I already had a Facebook account prior to this assignment. https://www.facebook.com/jessica.j.hudson.1?ref=tn_tnmn is the link to my Facebook page. As part of this assignment, we were asked to befriend teachers and other people that we may know on Facebook. I must admit that it was rather strange sending friend requests to my professors! Somehow, that seemed to be outside the realm of propriety. To this day, I do not have a Twitter account. I do not see the point of it to be honest. I have experienced Twitter by borrowing my friend's account to browse around it and find out if I wanted to sign up for it. After my experience, I concluded that I prefer my Facebook by far! However, I understand that there are benefits and down-sides to both social networking sites. For example, I like the graphic design and layout of Twitter better than Facebook, but Facebook has so many more features to offer than Twitter.

I believe that Facebook has more useful features for education than Twitter does because you can private chat on there, post pictures and text, like posts and pictures, comment on someone else's post, make your own pages for anything, and play games through Facebook. You can find friends, add friends, block friends, and specify who can see your page items. You can also make groups for people and create events to invite friends to. From what I remember about Twitter, you can add people to follow, post Tweets, and reTweet someone else's Tweet. I am not sure if it provides private messaging on the site.

I believe that there are classroom and school applications for Facebook. Educators can make their own Facebook pages. They can use the Facebook pages to post information and/or pictures about the students, their progress, their assignments, upcoming events, and many other classroom related topics. Administrators and other teachers can see the teacher's Facebook page to see the teaching techniques being used, the curriculum, and the student progress if the teacher chooses to post such things. I think it is important for educators to know how social networking works because it is a great way to communicate with people. It would be beneficial for educators to have social networking accounts with several different networks to open various lines of communication with other educators, their students, and the parents of their students.

I did not find out anything new about these websites that I did not know before. However, one new insight that I realized about Twitter is that one could follow teachers to see if they tweet anything useful from their classroom experiences.