Social Networks

In a perfect world, meaning no existence of social media site blocks at school, one way that I would incorporate social networking into the classroom would be to create a private Facebook page for each class. On this private page assignments would be posted and student responses and debates would be encouraged. Being private, only the students in that particular class can view and add to the posts. Still staying with Facebook, I think if the students created a student page where they could follow industry professionals or authors or associations that could offer beneficial information that would add to the topics being studied it would broaden their avenues of research. Of course, as a teacher I would have to have some control over who they were "friends" with and what groups the liked. Another way to incorporate social networking would be to create a class Twitter account where updates, assignments, and announcements could be posted for the class. I'm not so sure that I would encourage students to do research on Twitter because I don't think they can learn very much due to the limited number of characters in each post but I do think it's a great way to post important updates, deadlines and assignments.