Facebook, an online social network, is widespread in the school community in which I am a part of. Almost all students have a Facebook site and a vast majority of the staff does as well. I have found that within the community of teachers and administrators at my school who have a Facebook site, we often share and discuss issues or questions pertaining to work related topics. We must always be careful to keep confidentiality a top priority when using Facebook as our discussion platform because it is so public, but overall I have found this to be a very valuable resource that has served to increase my connections with the people I work with.
For this reason I would definitely be open to the idea of creating an online classroom community that is much like Facebook but with some added safety. The benefits of the students using such a community that I can predict might be them getting to know each other better and giving those students who are maybe not comfortable speaking in class a way to express themselves and contribute to the discussions. Netiquette would absolutely have to be taught to the students should they be involved with an online community but as long as I carefully guide and monitor what is posted in the community I don’t think it would be too much of a problem.
Thanks to another student in our class, I found out about an online site known as Edmodo that is much like Facebook, but designed to be used by educators in their classes. I am in the process of exploring what this site has to offer as far as ensuring student safety and privacy, but at first glance I really like the functionality of the free account I set up. If you want to check it out yourself here is a link to the site: http://www.edmodo.com/
