Definitely I would suggest not using a social technology when it requires
students to publicly share any of their contact or personal information.
Now you can use one and I've seen teachers do this great where students can
voluntarily share and get feedback from people beyond the students in their class.
But requiring that puts your students at a risk and
it's challenging oftentimes with parents.
because parents have differing values on when and how their kids should use social
technologies and you don't want to disrupt those necessarily.
So, avoid it when you have to publicly share content.
It's okay if it's optional.
And you probably want to avoid it when there's mixing.
So if you're going to have students use Facebook for example,
they probably use it personally, maybe not though,
it's starting to get less trendy with our younger kids.
But let's say they are using it personally.
If they are, you want to have a clear separate group or space in Facebook for
students to interact so that their social and their personal aren't mixing.
So that you can't possibly have some sort of weirdness happen with what your
students might be sharing personally versus in a learning environment.
Same holds true for you.
[LAUGH] A funny story that a teacher told me, maybe not so funny is they
weren't careful with where they posted a post about a family vacation.
It was a safe post.
But, they posted a post about a family vacation that wasn't meant for
their students that all their students got.
Because, it was so easy to accidentally do that.
So, be careful when you're using the social technologies or
don't use one when you could easily make that mistake.
You also want to be really careful when technologies are limited to specific
devices because not all students may be working from those particular devices.
So make sure that if you're using a social technology in particular it works across
platforms or devices that your students may have.
And of course, and this goes without saying, you want to make sure that
you are not using a social technology when it actually does not improve results.
And I say this not because it's obvious, but
because you should want to make sure that you're evaluating
how well did using that social technology actually improve results.
Question yourself, and ask your students and monitor their work,
to make sure it's having the right impact.
Now, the last thing that I will say that you may want to be careful of,
it may not be a reason not to use social technologies, but
you want to be careful of, is parent involvement.
I actually suggest that you let your parents know upfront.
Either at a parent night, or in an email, or
however you communicate with your parents, that you are having students
use a particular social technology in a specific way.
Because like I said before,
some parents have very specific values around how kids should be participating.
How their children should use those tools, and
you want to make sure that it's not conflicting with that.
Or that parents understand that it's not just about being social or play but
there's real learning value behind what they're doing.
Now how about effectiveness?