Pros and Cons of social networking in education

Social networking is taking the country by storm. In the recent years, instead of using social media as a place to mingle, places like schools and businesses try to use social networking for a positive purpose. With modern technology such as social networking being such a recent discovery, there are still many flaws, but also more benefits. 

Pros of social networking in school: With social networking, students are able to research more easily, create blogs, and share their ideas with other students over the web. Connecting to my life, we use things such as blogger to connect with students in the classroom outside of class, expressing our ideas and our discoveries on a topic. In one study, George Middle School in Portland Oregon introduced social media to their students. Grades had gone up 50% and chronic absentee had gone down 33% since bringing social networking to the classroom ( Elizabeth Delmatoff, "How Social Media Transformed Our School Community," www.oregoned.org, Apr. 2010). 

Cons of social networking in school: Social media can be very beneficial in connecting students for educational purposes, but sometimes we take advantage of these uses of social media. Social media can be a distraction to students with the most recent apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. With these apps, we distract ourselves from the real world and from the objective of studying or doing our homework. I could not accuratley guess how much time I spend on social media per day, but I do agree that it keeps me from doing my best in school, but I do not let it take over my life. On September 4th, 2014 a study done by Learning Habit that was published in the American Journal of Family therapy discovered that students in high school grades had steadily declined after 30 minutes of laptop or mobile phone use daily. After 4 hours of use daily, it had dropped one full letter grade. (Robert M. Pressman, Judith A. Owens, et al., "Examining the Interface of Family and Personal Traits, Media, and Academic Imperatives Using the Learning Habit Study," American Journal of Family Therapy, Sep. 2, 2014)

Comments

  1. Mr. Luke CrawfordFebruary 10, 2017 at 1:34 PM

    The remarks from Learning Habit where as "grades had steadily declined after 30 minutes of laptop or mobile phone use daily" is an interesting claim. Evidently, the grade of the student is deteriorating away percentage point by point, when those thirty minutes of homework time are spent else where. From time to time I do take breaks during my homework, however, I don't believe 90 minutes on the Instagram as determined by my iPhone, over the course of seven days, poses to be too much of a distraction for me.

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