District launches social networking site to link students
August 17, 2010
By Chantelle Lusebrink
Forget Facebook. Issaquah School District students, teachers and parents will soon be connected online with a site dedicated to advancing education.
This fall, every student in the district will get usernames to Issaquah Connect, a secure social networking site run from the district’s server.
“This is a virtual extension of our classrooms,” Executive Director of Educational Technology Colleen Dixon said. “This is the world, this is how we interact, how we get information and how we talk to each other in many ways.”
Issaquah Connect, the Issaquah School District’s new social network, links students for sharing educational opportunities. Contributed
Issaquah Connect has been operational for about a half-year, but teachers have been using other online tools, like Blackboard and Google Groups, to connect with students for years.
The new site enables every school and teacher to have easily accessed and updatable information on one page. The pages are similar in nature to those you’d see on other social networking sites, like Facebook, but the information is relevant and educational.
The pages allow administrators to post a school profile, information about departments, classes, faculty, clubs and schedules. They also have blogs written by faculty, calendars and important documents, like school supply lists.
In the past six months, faculty members have been testing the site. Schools like the former Pacific Cascade Freshman Campus — now Pacific Cascade Middle School— and Apollo Elementary School participated, Dixon said.
Teachers at those schools have been using their profile pages to post syllabi, homework assignments, and related files and documents to support homework or research, she said.
The coolest part, she said, is that teachers and students can continue discussions, even when class is over.
Already, there have been instances of peers helping peers with impromptu online tutoring from the site on the forums, district Webmaster Robert Miller said.
The discussions give teachers a better understanding of how many students are unclear on a topic, what teachers might need to re-address and how they might explain it differently.
Students and teachers can also create and share information, like relevant research, media articles and files about educational topics.
Just like the classroom, “the teacher is seeing everything that is posted and the teacher is hosting the forum and conversation,” Dixon said.
“We’re trying to provide safe and secure options for our teachers and students,” she added. “The real benefit — we do have control over user content and something that has been posted. We don’t have control if they’re connecting on Google Groups.”
Dixon and Miller also said, the site isn’t intended to be one more thing teachers need to do. Instead, it is a meaningful tool that is easy to use and understand. It is up to teachers to individually set limits for how they and their students will use it, in and out of the classroom.
While students and teachers will be the only ones invited to participate in and access online forums, they won’t be the only ones with usernames for the site. It will also be open to parents and community members active in the school system, but those usernames are still being formulated, Miller said. Other areas are completely open to the public, like the school profile, but only to view them.
If you do use the site, all district rules that typically apply in the classroom — maintaining respect for others, keeping discussions intellectual and not posting inappropriate comments — or to using district Internet services, still apply.
People found violating those terms will be disciplined and inappropriate comments will be removed.
“In today’s world, parents are concerned with new technology and how it is being used,” Miller said. “This is an opportunity for teachers to be a part of that educational process, and help children use it responsibly and learn how to use it before they go out into the real world.”
When students graduate, or families no longer want to participate online, district officials have created a system that disables their participation, but keeps the profile they created and their documents in case they need them later.
Families that don’t wish to participate can opt out by not signing on.
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Great post. I think this idea is really effective. Now a days internet is widely used so it will become easy to contact your school teachers and management. This can be an effective mode of communication between student and school.