Social Networking in School
In today’s society, social networking has become an extremely popular thing. Billions of people are accessing it daily around the world. Why wouldn’t they be? Everything seems to go back to it especially with the younger generations, specifically high school/ college students. However, when everything leads back to social networking it makes many things much more difficult when social networking sites are banned at a lot of schools and on their internet available to students. Social networking should be allowed in schools, they are so popular among teens especially, and when used right be used educational.
To start with, a recent survey found that 73% of teens are online and using social-networking sites. Updating their social media sites and simple going on to refresh them has because normalized over the last few years, which isn’t surprising considering how easy it has become. For most parts, they are spending the most time on them out of school as something to do when bored or for a specific reason. At a lot of schools that offer internet access to students, they have the popular sites such as Facebook and Instagram banned from using them. While I can understand it may not be educationally relevant for schools to be supporting and promoting these services as it could be viewed as “distracting”, they are taking away these sites that could be educationally helpful if used correctly.
Today, books are essential in school, but as any trip to the bookstore would show not all books are appropriate for the classroom. That goes hand in hand with the cell phone use, cell phone use in school is automatically vied as a bad thing if a teacher looked on your phone and saw that you were on a social networking site, however if used appropriately they can be beneficial. Would educators ban all books from being used in class because some of them are “bad”? Of course not, so how is it any different when it comes to cell phones. If anything they are more useful when it comes to education because it’s like having as mini library in your hands that you can find the answers in no time. Since the schools choose which books they view as appropriate for school, it should be the same with cell phones rather than banning them entirely.
There are also many apps and websites designed for schools that are very educational. Not only do they allow for educational relevant communications for students in the class room, but it allows them to interact with other students in faraway classrooms whether it’s in the same area or all across the world so they can reach to each other and learn from each other. These tools and apps encourage students to interact with each other, using many of the same techniques they do when away from school but instead focused on their educational mission.
Social media is now becoming a popular and very common pastime for the current generation of school children. With social media playing such a central role in...
