Ideas on social media tools and resources for schools?

I am working on designing a social media program for a group of secondary schools undergoing a nationwide ICT empowerment program in Nigeria. I am designing a social media curriculum to
be integrated into this ICT training, as well as a social networking platform
all these schools will be interconnected on. Kindly share your thoughts on
existing resources and tools I can use for the program.

Tags: curriculum, learning, media, platforms, schools, social

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Permalink Reply by Ben Sanoff on January 2, 2011 at 11:06pm

Hey Gbenga,

I have some experience working on online learning platforms. If you are looking for a non hierarchical social networking site similar to facebook I might recommend ELGG. I used this social networking platform to have students and teachers collaborate on a video project. The interface was intuitive for the students to work with and led to an impressive final product in many cases.

An open source option like ELGG is nice because of the flexibility provided by the multitude of themes and plugins.

Good Luck

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Permalink Reply by Jesse R Elam on January 3, 2011 at 8:24am

I agree with Ben, ELGG is great if you are looking to develop something right from scratch and depending on your programming skills. Another alternative could be Wordpress with the Buddypress package installed, depending on what type of functionality. We are using it in Japan right now at my University to connect the entire campus and it seems to be very useful, easy to maintain and fun for the students interaction. It also allows themes as Ben described below. You can have it resemble Facebook by installing a theme called Fishbook. You may have a look at one of my social networks if you would like after the semester is over next month. The only advantage of Wordpress over ELGG is that the community is bigger so there are a lot more plugins, themes, widgets etc... that can be installed with a click of the button from the admin page. Also, you can manage many social network sites from one Super Admin Control Panel. Both are great Open Source options.