Assignment 1

The Advantages And Disadvantages In Integrating Social Networking Tools Into ESL Writing Classroom. by Melor Md Yunus, Hadi Salehi & Chen Chenzi.

The Advantages are;

• As a platform to teach ESL writing.

 Through Social Networking Services (SNSs), teachers and students can share idea and interest, find solution, upload variety kind of media and hold an educational online forum. In the other hand, using SNSs tools have more options than using communication tools. With all the feature that SNSs has, it can gain students interest to participate and enjoy writing classes. Other than that, students nowaday are digital natives. So students can write and voice out their opinion and present their material in the familiar and comfort way. likewise, classes that carried in non face to face are helpful for shy students to reach out. The large audience using SNSs teach the students to take responsibility of their work. Thus, in leads to self -directing learning and empower their work.

•  Have a great benefit for life long education.

 Using SNSs tool such as blog and facebook helps enhancing student’s skill such as the ability to search information and interact meaningfully. In the other hand, it helps develop student’s writing skills and trigger their creative thinking. In addition, it build student’s motivation and confidence. This output from using SNSs tool in studies are very useful for students not just in writing class but in their future as well.

• Strengthen relationship among teachers as well between teachers and students.

  By using the SNSs tools, teachers are able to appear students. When the teachers know their students better, teachers could learn how to be tolerate with the students and understand the needs of the students in a specific way.

The disadvantages are;

•  A huge risk of students distraction that is caused by the large degree of entertainment served on the SNSs. Thus, the biggest challenge for the students is to control themselves to study online.

• Connection between teachers and students can lead to breed inappropriate relationship.

• It is hard to gain participation of the students in an academic forum.

• Lack of technology devices in school.

• Insufficient both of theoretical and practical training of using ICT among teachers.

• Using SNSs are time consuming.

 Its take time to search, design and edit material for both students and teachers. In addition, modifying learning material can be frustrating for the teachers. Likewise, students will spend more time playing game and chatting on-line instead of focusing on their writing tasks.

• Students will encounter with uncertain information that can cause them misunderstood what they have learn.

• Encourage negative attitude such as lying and even worse commit students to do plagiarism.

• Lead to the syndrome of ‘copy paste’ in students writing tasks due to extensive online resources. As a result, the students writing and thinking skills cannot be boosted.

Through my experience of being a student, learning using SNSs Tool is always irrelevant. This is because I used to get education in a countryside , the place which are not well equipped with technology devices. The worst is the school have very limited internet access and the only person who have the authority to use them is just the teachers and school management. Not to be rough, but talking about integrating SNSs tools into writing classroom in countryside is useless. In urban area however, have a well progress of using IT. Though in urban city have enough facility to integrate the SNSs in learning, yet the problem still appear regarding to- do the students can adapt to the learning environment without getting distract?. The safety of using internet also can be questioned because this issue is seriously can affect both students and teachers personal life.

 

In my opinion, though integrating SNSs tools in writing classroom seems to face a lot of obstacle, there still have a way we can do to overcome the problem and it would need a lot of hard work indeed. The step we should take to make it worthwhile is , first, make sure all school have the facilities. Secondly, teachers and parents work together to guide the students so that they are using the facilities wisely and emphasize them to focus while using SNSs in the class. Third, give teachers enough knowledge in both theoretical and practical of using ICT and SNSs tools as well as train them to be professional and show good attitude. But personally, in my perspective as a student, it will be definitely hard to focus on the study by using the SNSs tools. When I look at the perspective as a future teacher, using SNSs Tools may be the easier way to approach my students but not in integrating SNSs tool into the classroom. Further research and new system is what we have to discover in order to make it really successful. And for sure,to face the challenge, we need to prepare our mentality and financial and make it come true.