Sunday, September 12, 2010

Twiducate

      As I was searching for a blog post about technology in the classroom, I came across an article about Twiducate. This is a new social networking sites for schools. A major pro of this site is that student accounts are linked with a classroom code, therefore students never have to put any personal information on this site. This is beneficial because it ensures students safety more so than a site like Twitter. I think this because unless you want to approve "followers" on Twitter, anyone can see what you tweet for example. However, on the other side, a con to Twiducate could be that your students are only allowed to interact with their classmates.
     Other benefits are sharing information between you and your students or one student to another. Also, students would be able to access this site on any computer therefore this is something they could do at home to continue their learning after they leave school. However, an issue that arises with Twiducate is that most other social networking sites are blocked at schools. So, there is a chance that this site may or may not be accessible to students at school, which poses a major disadvantage.
      Another thing I would add is that Twiducate will only be what you make it out to be. Therefore, I think this could be something that could be considered as a pro or a con. Like Professor Kruse mentioned in class, a new technology is only interesting to students for so long. Therefore, it is crucial to keep the students attention by acquiring new knowledge about the technology as you go in order to keep the students entertained, but also moving forward in learning through this technology. If you give students access to a site that you never use, students will never get anything out of it. This is the same idea as if you tell your students to read a book, but you never discuss anything from the book after.
     Currently there are many people addressing this same debate: Is Twiducate beneficial or not? The link to the article I recevied information from is below. It also provides you with more practical uses for Twiducate.

 http://www.mraspinall.com/?p=248

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