School Districts - Turn Off Your Buzz!
While GoogleApps for Education may be catching on in some places, it’s clear that tomorrow, many school district technology administrators are going to wake up and do something really terrible—block Gmail access in their districts.
While Gmail is already blocked in many districts for students, it is still available for adult users. Yet, social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook ARE blocked to adult users because they are perceived to “fritter away” time that educators should be spending improving AYP, enhancing high-stakes testing anxiety, you name it. Education is a serious business, and it’s frightening to think that adults may be wasting their time, putting themselves at risk DURING the school day sending out tweets, Facebooking, or Buzzing. And, as many have pointed out, there are plenty of “off-task” social networking educators who will cross the line…at least, enough to get written up or fired if the need arises.
And, now, with Buzzcantweet.com—a web site that enables you to post to Twitter from Google’s newest addition to the social networking family (Buzz)—I suspect districts will block Gmail. After all, turning off Buzz in Gmail is a PERSONAL choice. No school district can say to its employees, “turn off your Buzz!” They’ll opt for the easy way out and just block Gmail. Sad, but true.
But will that really matter? With mobile smartphone use numbers rising—even among teens—how long will it be before people are using Buzz to Tweet then Facebook? And, trust me, this is possible…one stop shopping.
A few months ago, I shared a diagram about how I could post to ONE social network and have everything disseminated to all the others.
For example, my old approach was to post something to Plurk, adding a special hashtag to send it to Twitter, and it would end up on Twitter, which in turn, posted it on Facebook.
Or, I write a blog entry, and it goes immediately to Twitter, which then ends up in Facebook.
Now, the approach is incredibly simple.
Do you need all these fancy social networking sites? Not really. But here’s the diagram I’d like to have:
And if you don’t know what the icons represent…
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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure