The Social Network Connection

Are students too connected? Is Social Network running their lives...

Social networking is when "groups of people with common interests, or like-minds, associate together on social networking sites and build relationships through community." Social networking sites include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and many more.

 

Students of today’s Netgeneration society use these sites at high rate speeds and constant times throughout each day to stay connected and up to date on the new trends and data. Students use these sites on their mobile phones and tablets. As teachers we could ignore this trend and keep it separate from school, but in my personal experience teaching in a high school and coaching high school girls’ sports I know that we are losing this battle. This generation is constantly on their phone, especially with the BYOD to school policy in FCPS students make it harder for us to keep them off these sites.

 

Maybe there’s a happy medium teachers and parents can find with young teenagers involving social networking. There can be educational opportunities for these sites. The first that comes to mind is teaching students the right way to post on these networks. They need to learn safety and networking responsibility. Many students are passionate about using these sites, so the question becomes how can we tap into that passion and use it in the classroom for a benefit? Students needs to first understand a healthy balance in these networking sites. I’ve seen firsthand that students check the sites obsessively and post things that aren’t always beneficial to their character or well-being, thus failing to realize the privacy issues involved. It’s apparent that not all parents are covering the duty of teaching teens about the importance of what they post on social network sites and the privacy issues involved, so it’s up to we educators to take the responsibility and step up to the plate.