But this past week I have been truly excited.

I’ve been researching some new ways to incorporate social networking tools into my classroom, mainly Twitter, but I hope to add Facebook (by way of a program Fan Page) to the mix as well. I will be writing a social networking policy for my students to get everything started on the right foot.

As a result I’ve done a lot of searching online to try and find examples of the use of Twitter in the classroom and of social networking policies that address the use of Twitter by students for educational purposes.

I have found many examples of using Twitter with students, for example:

• Twenty-Nine Interesting Ways* to use Twitter in the Classroom
• Embracing Twitter in the Classroom
• Best Practices in a Twitter-enhanced High School Classroom

I haven’t yet found any examples of Twitter policies. This means I will most likely just have to draft my own. That’s ok and I really figured that would happen anyway, but I am hoping to get feedback from some teachers that have experience using it as well and know more of the ins and outs about it.

And a Twitter page.

I’m on LinkedIn too – even though I don’t really know what to do with it.

I don’t do MySpace.

It’s a pain to check 3 different web pages to keep up with my friends, news, etc… Peter introduced me to

(image is clickable)

This is too cool.

You can track all of your social networking accounts in one place (they currently support Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn). You can download software to use on your computer or use their web application (that’s what I’m doing), and/or download the mobile application for your phone.

The only current drawback I’ve found (at least with the web version, I haven’t tried the download software yet), is that it doesn’t support Twitter lists. It does have a feature called “groups” which is like having a list (a group of people you follow), but you have to add them one by one. I don’t follow that many people yet so it’s been easy for me to just create new groups.