Adventures in Social Networks in High School Education

The past 5 years have brought about many positive changes in how we can collaborate using technology.  Having students collaborate outside of the classroom over weekends and even summer breaks have been my driving force to refine a social network in our school district.

My first public, web-based social network experience outside of Myspace or Facebook was Ning.  At the time it was FREE and AWESOME!  I promoted the Ning network at our school and it caught on quickly, only to be forced into a quick retirement because Ning started charging for accounts.

We asked around and searched for a replacement and found Grou.ps, which boasted a FREE network with a Ning migration solution to move all our our users.

By now we had accumulated hundreds of users over 20 or so networks that loosely connected to each other.  We started to centralize and organize the new networks this year. Grou.ps decided to start charging and froze our networks without warning when we reached an overage on bandwidth.

We are in the process of selecting another social network solution for collaboration.

This time we are moving to an in-house network on our servers with Moodle.

We’ve just begun testing and it seems to be a solution that may take the place of a few web collaboration platforms we have been using.

Are any of you using Moodle?  Have you experienced this with other networks?  Are you using some other type of social network for collaboration?