{"id":10,"date":"2007-09-05T16:16:03","date_gmt":"2007-09-05T07:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edtechtesol.org\/blog\/2007\/09\/05\/social-networking-for-educators\/"},"modified":"2007-09-11T18:04:51","modified_gmt":"2007-09-11T09:04:51","slug":"social-networking-for-educators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edtechtesol.org\/blog\/2007\/09\/05\/social-networking-for-educators\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Networking for Educators"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Stephen<\/a>The fact that social networking sites are popular with students is obvious, but what I did not realize was how popular they have become with educators. One of my recent goals has been to work more on entering in discussion for professional development, and this blog is actually one of the first steps. I first learned of the motivating force of online discussion firsthand through my past experience with a personal blog<\/a>. The discussions that began there led to interesting insights, wonderful tangents, and even a few good friends. The old personal blog has now faded away, but I want to now apply the same principals to professional development. Enter Ning<\/a>, Facebook<\/a>:”Facebook(My Facebook profile)”:http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/p\/Stephen_W_Henneberry\/678357752, LinkedIn<\/a>:”LinkedIn(My LinkedIn profile)”:…<\/p>\n

I have been a member of LinkedIn<\/a> for a while now, even though I was pretty sure that there was not much focus on education there, but I have found the experience interesting. Even though many of the discussions there are not related to education, I found that I was enjoying the process of the interaction. After all, even though as an educator I may be tied to one discipline, as a teacher I am not. I have long felt that being a teacher is not a job, but a lifestyle, and LinkedIn<\/a> has helped to remind me of that again. I like to help. I like to teach. This is why I am a teacher, and this is why I find the discussion so interesting. Armed with this experience with a general social networking site, I decided to create my own focused social network using Ning.com<\/a>.
\nNing<\/a> is a site where you can create your own social networks, and would probably be a pretty good tool for managing classes as well. I quickly created a network for myself and my fellow MA students, and the discussion began. Now we have our own “walled garden” style network for discussion and sharing. The reason I felt that we needed this is that we are all distance students, we simply cannot meet down at the local pub or student union to tip a beer and talk shop: Ning<\/a> is now our pub. And our pub is not the only one on the block. I have already come across other groups of educators in both Ning<\/a> and Facebook<\/a> and joined in with them. So social networking for educators? Yes, most definitely. Although I would not say that I have made any “real” connections as of yet, the discussion and learning is happening…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fact that social networking sites are popular with students is obvious, but what I did not realize was how popular they have become with educators. One of my recent goals has been to work more on entering in discussion for professional development, and this blog is actually one of the first steps. I first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1u7IY-a","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edtechtesol.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edtechtesol.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edtechtesol.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edtechtesol.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edtechtesol.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.edtechtesol.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edtechtesol.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edtechtesol.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edtechtesol.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}