TechNewsWorld suggests it’s time to end the stark dichotomy of second-nature social networking at home vs. a complete ban on social networking at school – even in an academic context. Though not so much in the classroom, “some school districts are going beyond e-mail technology and using collaboration software and online services to share information, host Web conferences and assign tasks and projects,” and teachers are social networking with each other for professional purposes. Certainly we don’t have to be all literalist about social networking and allow the negative, narrowly defined presentation of it in the news media to be what we picture of social networking at school. There are all kinds of forms social networking can take, from wikis to collaborative video producing to podcasting to class blogging to transworld collaboration in a global classroom! The TechNewsWorld article includes an annotated list of social-networking tools for the education market that might interest parents as well as teachers – for example, Blackboard’s Sync, Cramster.com for the college market, ePals for K-12, Jooners, and Wimba Pronto.
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