Week 2: Article Review 3: Social Softawre in Education

Ferdig, R. E. (2007). Editorial: Examining Social Software in Teacher Education. Journal of Technology & Teacher Education, 5-10
The following article discusses a teacher learning about a student’s extra curricular activities via Facebook and how teachers need to incorporate technology in the classroom. Teachers need to begin teaching students the good, bad and ugly of technology. The good parts of technology is that it is easily accessible, the bad would be how employers, teachers, parents can view students web pages and find inappropriate things that can be used as a fuel to punish that student, the ugly is the pure fact that there are online predators out there and have caused problems with teens. The most interesting thing about this article was the argument that teaching doesn’t always have to involved being confined to a desk or virtually all online, there are still many ways to teach students by using games, educational field trips, and the pure fact of doing what your learning in a lab.
I have had friends that had to change their profiles via Facebook or MySpace because of a certain job interview or I have had friends change their status on these online social networks to private so that certain individuals didn’t have full access to their profiles. Most of the social networking software has privacy privileges which are very impressive because it is true you can access basically anything online and can view anyone. I use some privacy privileges on my MySpace or Facebook because I only want to stay in contact with friends or family that I approve of; and I typically don’t approve people that I do not know. This article gives reasons of why technology is important and gives out some reasons why individuals can be weary of technology. In the end, technology is inevitable and people must adapt to it or else they will be left behind in society.