Tim’s Blog

I came across this article in a “Mulitmeadia and Internet @ Schools” magazine and was interested in reading it as it is hard to ignore the spread of online social software that young people are being caught up in. Site such as Facebook and MySpace are becoming ever so popular with not only teenagers and young adults but with primary school students as well. From what I have noticed primary school children are more interested in MySpace than Facebook mainly becasue mySpace has more multimedia applications.

This article gives a nice run down as to what social software is and what the main programs are and what a teacher’s concerns are with them using this software. Teachers are worried that children can be exposed to very explicit content on these pages and alot of the images are not suitable for young children. Also the fact that facebook has a feature where you can create groups and invite other students to join certain groups and events whilst excluding others. Groups can end up being created for the purpse of being hurtful and abusive to other students.

The school that Barrett writes about had to end up removing access ro social networking sites form thier school servers. It seems that this will be the way all schools go in the future to prevent online bullying and other hurtful instances happening.