Social Networking

Social networking is branching out each and everyday. Recently, for my graduate class at Michigan State University I had to branch out too. Before I only used wikispaces.com and email to connect with people, but I have found some benefits professionally and personally in joining twitter, blogspot and diigo.
Twitter allows me to get updates from people I want to connect with and block those I don't want to connect with. I recently tweeted one of my professors about the benefits of the einstruction mobi. Even though we are in different states, we could have a quick conversation just like if we were colleagues in the same building. Twitters ability to tag people you want to connect with gives you the power to gain the knowledge about the information you want.
Blogspot allows me to reflect my thoughts and express my opinions about my education. It also allows others to connect with my ideas and add more to them. Blog spot in the classroom would be a great tool because students could take ownership of their education, and that is powerful! Students could follow others in the same educational settings or different and gain empathy through their findings.
Diigo provided me with the opportunity to connect with other teachers in my group to organize educational websites for our presentation and classroom. Diigo gives me a chance to annotate and highlight information that is important then save it and send to others. This might be a helpful tool for intervention specialist to give students a chance to recognize main ideas and supporting details in a passage on the website. I know this is a social bookmarking tool, but the connection that diigo has with its ability to create groups provide a network.
With the ever changing world networking becomes more and more of a powerful tool to provide personal and professional connections with people across the globe. It reminds me of a song I heard once," It's a small world after all."