# 14: Facebook and others...

I have only been 'into' Facebook for a little over a year, drawn into it by my youngest son who was saving with his fiancé to drive around Australia for their honeymoon. Although a strange environment for me, I took to it like the proverbial duck.

I had hoped to gain a few 'friends' thinking how embarrassed I would be to have a 'friendless' status. No worries on that count. apart from my son and fiancé and a few surprised real life friends, I was reacquainted with over 90 ex students making their way into tertiary education or the business world. Catching up with them on the 'Home' page is always an education of my own!

I was hesitant to fill in all those lank fields when I set up my profile and found that this very very public side is the default. Privacy settings have to be located and set by the user. Although I did allow my day/month of my birthday to be visible which is very uplifting around birthday time! One of my scallywag ex-students from my '87 Primary class posted a message to me that read "Hey Happy Birthday Mrs A! You were my maddest and baddest teacher". Loved that comment:)

BTW, youngest son is now married and they have made it to Broome where they are staying for three months working to save enough to come home! Their images have been wonderful. Middle son is now working in Port Headland and his images are surreal with red dust to the horizon. Eldest son rang me from Sydney and appologised for not accepting my 'friends' request. I can understand that privacy should remain private (after finding out a few eye opening weekend fun my adult-ex-students got up to!) Pity there aren't FB settings for Friends, Family, Workplace.

But Facebook in an educational setting? Mmmm not so sure. I make it a point not to accept ex student 'friends' from Primary School or Secondary School. I can network with them in other ways. (Like on playground duty!) For teachers to understand the uses of these social networking tools, I think they also need to understand FB's potential as well as its pitfalls as I found in this You Tube video:

So the educationally responsible thing to do here is to keep providing young people and their parents, ways to use social networking sites safely. Here is a great idea that I found: Facebook Do's and Dont's.

I did play around with group searches (something not tried before) for 'primary' and found the 'Treasure Tree' an IWB resource for teachers (thanks Sharon!)

Twitter on the other hand is a great tool for microblogging and I use it more for professional research than for personal 'tweeting'. My principal asked me to do some research on using mobile phones as a tool in an educational setting. I huffed and puffed and laboured on the Internet and then thought of my Twitter account. I tweeted my request and in came weblinks, blogs, wikis, comments and articles. I had a plethora of information and allowed my principal to think (for almost an hour) how exceptional I was to gather all this information for her!!

Twitter also gives me an insight into conferences were attendees tweet their reactions and keynote 'one liners'. I couldn't afford to go to the 2010 IWB Net Conference so by just searching for #iwbnet10, I could catch up on the responses from those who attended.