Jeff Meyers's Page

Hi Jeff, Up here in Toronto there was similar concern about online interaction with students through Web 2.0 tools. I've been implementing private academic social networks, as opposed to using public space blogging and other Web 2.0 hosted tools. In creating private social networking spaces for classroom interaction the teacher, the school and the district have far more control over content. Check out www.meetatrecess.com. It is built around virtual classrooms and gives you a class calendar, student and teacher profile pages, parental views of the classroom with access to their child's work and teacher contact, blogging, chat, video, photo, private email, document sharing, micro-blogging (like the wall in Facebook or Twitter), news and alert feeds. It has blocking filters for dealing with inappropriate content as well as a "report it" feature for flagging potentially offensive content that can then be reviewed. It's great value for a minimal investment. The secret sauce in this comes from the teacher's ability to integrate the learning in the bricks and mortar classroom with the virtual online classroom. Up here in Toronto teachers have actually created rubrics for blogging and the other Web 2.0 applets. To implement this social network we jumped through all kinds of security hoops and concerns from the school district. But the end results have been very exciting.