Educational Social Networking for Professional Development

Educational Social Networking for Professional Development                                 June 13, 2012

The main topic covered during class room 2.0 Live, guest speaking Steve Hargadon was Educational social networking, and the benefits of social networking for educators. Social networking is the aggregation of web tools for building community and content. It is unique ability to use a variety of tools to make social networking easier. Another topic covered was the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.  Web 1.0 means someone else make content and we receive, read, and research it, but Web 2.0 is a framework of user participation and we contribute to it, collaborate, and create much more instead. . Behind all social networking are building materials or tools, instead of looking at the actual tools that make up the social networking we look at the end results, and that is what scares us often.

Educational Networking: The benefits of social networking for educators.

·         Invention of the Printing Press, a huge difference since in society.

·         Blogs- content could be up on the web for everyone to see.

·         Wikis- People writing over other peoples writing makes it intimidating and complicated, but also very useful.

·         Social Networking- Ability to be creative, but do not have full control over the page. It is easy and it has immediate feedback which makes it very popular. There are more members on Social networking than bloggers in a day. If Facebook is a country then its members would be the fourth largest country in the world.

What is social networking? The aggregation of web tools for building community and content.  The Building materials make the social networking (Facebook and MySpace). Educators are not looking at the tools that were used to build social networking, but they look at the end result of what the materials have created.  If the social networking materials are used in the right way, it would become an educational network.

            Social networking, Web 1.0 and 2.0 impact teaching and learning if they are used in an educational setting with materials that benefit students.  Learners can enjoy using educational networks more than face to face teaching that can make them more active in speaking and participating during the session.

            All five domains totally fit into social networking and web learning’s. Educators and professionals use design domain to design social networking or web learning. They use the development domain to translate the design specifications into physical form. Then they use utilization domain to address the interface between the learner and the instructional materials or system by using right resources, policies, and regulations. The management domain also fits into social networking and web learning’s by administrations that planning, monitoring, and controlling. Also, the evaluation domain that analysis problems and quality improvement is a part of their work.

            The future teaching will concentrate on using technology as educational tools; social networking will be a very important part of people’s lives. I will use all these technology tools in my teaching career.