Chapter 9: Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts

This chapter was interesting because it sort of talked about a the controversial discussion of whether social networks like Facebook and Ning should be used in the classroom to help facilitate learning.  This technology is huge among not only students but people of all ages now.  Facebook is a social network that is very popular for people to stay in touch and look at pictures of their friends and family.  I bet that most students check their facebook accounts more then any other website that they would go too.  This just shows that if students were able to use facebook to help them learn it would be a very powerful tool.  I think that this wouldn't be a bad idea if you could create a private group just for you class that they could work on going at their own pace and on their own time.  It would have to be something that all of your students would agree too becuase to them facebook might be a very private place for them even though it is a social network.  They might not want to have it deal with their school at all.  If students were excited and did like it then I feel that it could be a very powerful tool to help students learn.  I think Ning could be a very useful site because it seems like its design is more geered toward education.  I am not very familiar with this website at all so I would have to go on it to understand it more but from the reading it seems like it could be used to help education.  I think if facebook could work it would be a better site to use because it is more popular and common which would be easier for students to use because they know how to use it and they already have accounts.
As a future teacher I will maybe talk to the administration and see what they think about useing these social network sites.  It is kind of a controversial discussion because many people think that this technology should never be used in education.  It is an interesting thing to talk about.  I feel that it could work if the students are motivated and excited to do it.  I feel that this could be easy for them and since it is on facebook they may feel that they are not doing boring homework.  Plus many students do homework with facebook already on so this way they would have to multitask all the time.  It could be a great place to facilitate a discussion and help the students learn in a different and creative way.