1. Social networking? Never heard of it!
You’ll almost certainly have heard of MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Del.icio.us …. or of at least one of these! All of these sites use various forms of social networking – also known as ‘hanging out with your friends online’. Having a teenager in the house is a handy way to keep up-to-date with these various applications and websites (actually one of the few perks!). Here’s a quick beginner’s guide to the various sites mentioned above:
MySpace: You can set up your own ‘webpage’ here with text and multi-media content, and also receive comments and add friends to your network. It is favoured by younger people, especially teenagers.
Facebook: Initially set up within Harvard University for students to network online, this is similar to MySpace, but it is favoured by a slightly older crowd and has more add-ins. Some use it for professional networking, although another site, LinkedIn, is the most serious (some would say staid) social networking platform used for business contacts.
Flickr: You can easily upload and share photos and images on this site, and leave comments about other people’s images. It provides an excellent source of copyright-free images for teachers.
YouTube: It is easy to upload and share videos on this site, and you can leave comments about other people’s videos.
Twitter: With this site, you can send instant online text messages simultaneously to a network of friends. Each message can be a maximum of 140 characters (not words!) long. Brevity is, therefore, essential. This kind of messaging is known as ‘micro-blogging’. (See ETp Issue 60 for more information about Twitter.)
Del.icio.us: Using this site, you can keep your browser bookmarks (or ‘favourites’) online, storing them in categories with key words. Anyone can then access and search them. It is a good way of sharing resources and websites.
2. They all do different things: how are they ‘social networking’?
The websites described above are examples of different kinds of social networking. If we think of ‘social networking’ as an umbrella term, there are lots of ways this can be done. So we have the social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn), we have photo/image and video sharing sites (Flickr and YouTube), we have instant social networking (Twitter), and we have social bookmarking (Del.icio.us). These sites and applications are all examples of so-called ‘Web 2.0’ tools, in which the user (you or I) generates the web-based content. Asked to define Web 2.0, in two sentences or fewer, one savvy respondent wrote*: ‘You make all the content. They keep all the revenue.’
3. What has all this got to do with language teaching?
Obviously, many of your younger students will already be using some of these social networking tools in their personal lives. Some of your students may have a Facebook account or may have uploaded videos to YouTube. At the very least, they will have watched videos on YouTube. Teachers need not only to know what these sites are for, and how to use them, but could even bring them into the classroom by getting students to set up accounts in one of these applications, and to use them to write, record or comment in English. A tool such as Twitter could be used for instant messaging among class members, for instance. Flickr could be used to share the results of a photo project. Facebook could be used to draw up profiles of each student, and class members could be invited as ‘friends’ who can then leave comments.
4. What about privacy issues?
Most of these sites have settings in which you can decide who can access content or contribute to what is already there. You and your students can decide what level of access is appropriate and how stringent control needs to be. Evidently this is a major concern for teachers of younger learners, and you may decide not to use a tool at all if the levels of security are not high enough for you.
5. I’m convinced. How do I get started?
As with any new tool, the first thing you need to do as a teacher is to try these tools out for yourself by setting up your own account in one or more of the applications and seeing how it works. The good news is that all of these sites are extremely easy to use and no technical knowledge whatsoever is required. Some sites have a helpful video tutorial for first-time users, and there is frequently a FAQ section to check out. It’s often a matter of overcoming teacher fears of new technology first – and what better way than by trying them out in your own time, in your own home?
* http://bash.org/?779320
Nicky Hockly has been involved in EFL teaching and teacher training since 1987. She is Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E, an online training and development consultancy. Nicky is co-author of How to Teach English with Technology, published by Longman, which won the 2007 Ben Warren Prize.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 61, 2009
