Social Networking Tools, Should Teachers Use Them?

I’m in the fortunate position of having three teenage daughters who are right into the use of tools such as Bebo, Facebook MSN for social contact, etc so I had a captive audience (so to speak) to run an impromptu survey on the use off these tools. When asked if Bebo, Facebook, MySpace etc should be used by schools/tertiary institutions for teaching the replies were unanimous and immediate.

“NO WAY! Keep out of our stuff, just use your Blackboard and eLluminate and leave our stuff alone!”

After such an adamant response, said daughters were asked to text (okay for teachers to use that..) their friends and ask them the same questions that I had asked them. Responses were swift and very much to the point. Not one person was in agreement that it would be a good idea for teachers to use these tools for teaching purposes. All agreed that teachers could use their own tools – and in a social networking capacity – and use texting but use of ‘their’ tools was considered to be an invasion of their territory and unacceptable to them.

So, if the use of social networking tools becomes a normal part of online communication for teaching institutions then, going by the responses gained from this far from scientific survey, they will have to develop their own tools if they want to avoid negative issues with their students.

After showing them what could be done, I asked what they thought of eLluminate and Blackboard. eLluminate was ‘pretty cool’, and had features they thought were really useful such as remote access to student desktops, showing your own desktop and running through tutorials on it, chat and audio, showing websites, plus many others.

Blackboard was thought to be great for access to resources and for self-testing, and email or texting were the preferred communication methods.

So, there we have it; the results of a far from scientifically conducted survey. I wonder how it would compare with a properly conducted national survey. Hmm...