Socıal Networkıng As An Educatıonal Tool

As we live in 21. century as a technology age, children are born as digital natives of this age. They are born and raised with technology, and they can not be kept away from technology. It is what they love and know. Integrating what they love into their learning process should be inevitable in order to enhance the quality of the learning. It is possible through the use of web 2.0 tools in education. Some of the web 2.0 tools can be listed as wikis, blogs, e portfolios, folksonomy sites, podcasts etc. Social networking sites that involves personal information such as age, sex, nickname, a profile photo do not necessarily display an educational benefit, however, they can be integrated into classroom procedure. 

           

Web 2.0 tools enable users to create the course content for their own learning, which makes the education more meaningful for them.  They can create and share information. Students of this age are hungry for entertainment while learning. They love learning from visual and audial contexts, rather than written texts. They also love collaborative works and studying with a group. They can handle multi tasks but their attention spans are relatively short. 

When it comes to literature research, web 2.0 reference materials are a little bit different from the traditional ones. In the literature, students can make their research interactively. Such tools as wikis and blogs offer a variety of research areas and students can make comments on them or share ideas about them. Such tools are important for students who want to make use of other people's experiences and researches. 

Social networking enhance the effectiveness of the course materials by enabling students to produce information together. Collaborative course desing is a very important feature in education. Courses should be designed according to students's needs. In this way, students feel more related to the lesson and more comfortable in the environment. Students should be active in the lesson and teacher should be  monitoring students. 

Students should control their own learning process with the help of authentic materials which enable them to connect what they learn with their own life experiences. Communication among students should be maintained by chat rooms, commenting or other communication networks. Students should be working interactively with each other in a group setting.

Learning design is a way of presenting learning activities to course designers in order for them to apply them into their cirriculum design. Some of the designing tools can be listed as Phoebe, JISCP Planner, Compendium.

Learning outcomes are the expressions of what students will know at the end of the lesson. Learners feel more comfortable when they know the assessment criteria and possible outcomes. Assessment should be an integrated part of learning and teaching process. 

The idea behind web 2.0 tools are extensive and comprehensive. They represent ideas that are power of the user created content, networking of group works and collaborative studies.