One More Thing

Today in a staff meeting our Principal talked about a new site. (Click here). This is a great site for initiating a conversation with your students and lo and behold, there is a section on social networking... Since Election Day is tomorrow, I found the following interesting...
"On Nov. 3, 2008, the day before the US presidential election,Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama had 2,379,102 Facebook supporters while Republican candidate John McCain had 620,359. Obama had 833,161 MySpace friends and McCain had 217,811. Obama had 384% more Facebook supporters and 383% more MySpace friends than McCain.

Did social networks help sway the election? Most assuredly yes...but did they "win the election"? I don't know if I would go that far but they definitely impacted it.
Check out the Pros and Cons section...Did you know that through social networking sites a 2009 study found that 17.3% of middle school students have been victims of cyberbullying?
A fact from this site that really blew me away is that 35% of adults and 65% of teens in America who use the Internet have profiles on social networking sites. The teen number I am not surprised about the the adult number I am...I thought it would be lower
The site is not biased and presents both sides of social networking issues. While we all agree that these online communities promote increased communication with friends and family, familiarize people with valuable computer skills, and allow contact with people from around the world, they expose children to predators, increase vulnerability to computer viruses, lower worker productivity, and promote narcissism and short attention spans....so I'm still learning about the major impact that social networks have and I'm leaning toward perhaps using them...maybe not this week...but by the end of the course? Very likely. Check out this site....it says it all.