Kid-Tested, Administration-Approved Twitter for your Class

High School teachers and even elementary teachers, it's time to get hip and join the social media networking frenzy.  It has become an increasing debate on if teachers should cross that line from privacy to public domain with their social networking profiles on Twitter, Facebook, etc., especially those who are fresh out of college within the past 5 years and witnessed the beginnings of "TheFacebook" (Facebook's original website title).  So how can educators still have a private life, write on friends walls about the upcoming gathering on the weekend, yet still be professional with students that live and breathe social media?  Introducing sites like Twiducate, "an opportunity for students to explore web 2.0 without the barriers and blocks of existing social networking websites."

School networks are keen to block trance-inducing sites like Facebook and Myspace, so incorporating social media into the classroom with the thumbs up from administration may be a bit tricky.  With Twiducate, it's a website solely designed for the classroom, controlled by the teachers, and just for the purpose to help connect the classroom... well, outside of the classroom.  A teacher is able to create her own profile and a unique classroom that she manages.  From there, the teachers actually create the students' profiles so as to disallow just any student, or any person for that matter to join the online class profile.  Creating a student under the controlled classroom profile churns out a unique passcode that a student can use once provided by the instructor to login to the specific classroom.

Once the classroom profile is set up and the students have their codes, the class can tweet away to one another, have discussions, comment on other topics, and even have quirky avatars to keep it light.  It's a safe website, safe in the sense that it's darn near impossible to do anything wrong on it.  Images or files can't be posted, and posts can be deleted by the teacher if need be.  Students can't wander into another "classroom," and they can't post official bookmarks to the group's page (only the teacher can).  It allows for a teacher to communicate with students over the weekend without the worry of providing phone numbers or facebook messages, yet its personal enough to be answered quicker than an email since it's within the community setting.

With Twiducate being so basic, there's hardly any options or profile changes anyone can alter or change.  After playing around with it for a few moments, one can even see a value in adding this into the elementary school classroom for 4th or 5th graders that may want to become wet behind the ears with social media (aka web 2.0).  As a matter of fact, Twidicate itself says on its website: "It is a fact that students will need social networking, blogging and basic internet skills to compete in today's business world."  I'd be very interested to see if school administration catches onto the need of students using and breathing social media.  Whether Twiducate or another website that offers such a web 2.0 service in an approved academic setting, it may be their only shot to keep up with these tech-savvy students.