Our Social Experiment Continues

Posted by: Cory Plough | August 11, 2008 | 4 Comments |

The school year is getting ready to start shortly, and that means time to take our piloted social network to the mainstream school population!

Last semester my assistant principal, a couple teachers and I piloted a private Ning network with the hope of creating a place for students at our online school to meet, share, and learn. It went really well so we are expanding it to the entire school. It will be voluntary, but has the capacity to have over 700 students and 30 teachers. Those numbers are the extreme, but we had 200 in our pilot so guessing we could at least see half of our students on the Ning this year.

We moved the network to a private domain for this year, added a chat application, and are conducting an orientation session that focuses on the network. This should help us alleviate some parent and student concerns from last year. Namely, our students didn’t like that they couldn’t chat easily and conducting the orientation gets everyone involved from Day 1.

I have high hopes that the network can be a source of change and create a community of learners at our school. Right now we have a culture of failure, in both our students and staff.

I’m betting that if students can form better relationships with peers and teachers then they will be more motivated to do the work. I’m betting that if they have easier access to assistance through peer tutoring and teacher availability then they will complete more assignments. I’m betting that if they feel like they are connected to something at a deeper level than just logging into classes and doing multiple choice assignments then they will have more success. I saw evidence of this when I interviewed kids last year about using Web2 and social networking in our school. Now, we just need to expand those opportunities to all of our students and hopefully failure and dropout rates will begin to change.

under: online education, school 2.0, socialnetworking
Tags: collaboration, community, ning, online education, social network, teacher access

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This is a fantastic idea! What were some concerns from parents when you started this? Do teachers at your school actually make time to be available/respond to questions and start dialogues?

By: Jessica on August 15, 2008
at 5:32 am

@Jessica – Parents were definitely concerned because when they think social network, they think MySpace and that has a negative connotation. We met with some parents early on and tried to explain that it was a ‘walled garden’ and that no one could enter that wasn’t invited by the school or from the school. We also developed an AUP that acted as a parent permission form and any students who didn’t get that form sign were denied access.

Since it was a pilot we selected 4 other teachers to be a part of the program. Those teachers helped out a little with admin stuff but mostly just had conversations, participated in groups, and helped keep an eye of their students. We asked up front that they log in 15 minutes a day in the evening, some did a lot more.

This semester we are inviting all the teachers and if get similar participation will be very happy. But honestly, most our teachers do not make themselves available after that 4 o clock hour.

By: Cory Plough on August 15, 2008
at 8:41 am

Hi there Cory, I started a ning for our high school and am still very interested in having a conversation with you about it. So far we only have a couple admin and teachers on it. I’m not ready to go live with students until i get a better handle on the potential risks and methods to manage those risks. As administrator to the ning, will i have rights to remove postings? Have you had to remove postings? Is your school ning private? ow do you prevent students from signing up with a bogus name?

By: annelisewojo on October 28, 2008
at 8:35 pm