Professional networking with Ning
Web 2.0 classroom applications September 15th, 2007
A new social networking site, Ning, has been gathering serious momentum over the past couple of months. Ning is a free web service that allows you to “create your own social network for anything.”
Many professionals and educators are using Ning to share ideas with others in their field. Several education Nings are popping up, allowing teachers and administrators from all over the world to share ideas in forums and blogs. Files and multimedia are also shared. Teachers can meet here to collaborate projects with other teachers, linking classrooms from all over the globe. Some teachers are even creating their own class Ning as a method of communicating with their students, parents and community.
Some of the Ning networks I belong to include:
- School 2.0
- Classroom 2.0
- The Global Education Collaborative
- NextGen Teachers
- Ning in Education
- Edublogger World
I would love to see examples of Nings set up for classrooms, particularly ones being used by students. If you have any stories about using Nings in this way (advantages, pitfalls, etc.) please share your thoughts. Happy Ninging!
September 16th, 2007 at 4:08 am
I’m trying a ning network for the 300+ music students (and former students and staff) at my FE college (Manchester, UK). Response so far (early days) is mostly positive but I have yet to see meaningful collaboration and connection going on in there! I’ll document the project, probably in Ning in Education – listed above.
September 29th, 2007 at 8:14 am
I was having a conversation with a colleague recently (before I discovered Ning) about how it would be great to replicate the enthusiasm students show for building Myspace sites etc. in an education forum. Once I found the Ning communities, the similarities struck me immediately. I would love to see a Ning site being used in a classroom environment. I am about to set up a Ning site to support Mac users (teacher’)in our cluster, so that will be an interesting experiment also.