Help! I need a short review on your use of Ning for Educational Purposes...

[Camila Guadalupe Cortea]

Hello Everybody!
My name is Camila, and I am a teacher to be. For a project about the use of NING for Educational Purposes, I would appreciate if any of you would be so kind as to write a short review about your experience in the use of Ning for EP. You could include the following:

1. How did you come up with the use of NING for your classes? Does it serve its purposes?
2. What are the advantages of using Ning?
3. How do your students react towards the use of this social network?
4. Which of the gadgets provided by Ning have you already used? Do you think they are useful tools?
5. Have you had any kind of problems using Ning for EP? Which one/s?
6. Any other comment about Ning

I would appreciate most if the review is published either in this forum or on your own website, because for the project we are required to provide an URL address. Any comments or questions, my e-mail address is [e-mail]
Thank you for your time!

[Mr. A]

Hi Camila,

My name is Mark. I am a graduate student at Louisiana State University. I will be obtaining my Master's in education in
the spring. I too am conducting research on this topic. I will be teaching chemistry and want to know the effectiveness of using this type of medium for supplementing my teaching of chemistry outside of the classroom. I have a lot of articles on this subject. Let me know if you are interested.

Regards,
Mark

[Camila Guadalupe Cortea]

Hi Mark!
Thank you for your reply. Yes, I would be very interested if you could share the articles on the subject we are dealing with.

[Mary Hricko]

Hi Camila,

I teach my classes in Ning instead of using the university CMS. It works great for me. My students love the network although like any web-based course, they need to be given an orientation on what goes on in the class and how it functions. Many of them are accustomed to the university CMS interface and when they see the ning thing, well, it's very different.

The biggest problem I see with ning is accessibility for students w/ disabilities. So far, I have not had a student in my class that needed special accomodations, but I am concerned about the accesssible design limitations of ning. I wish the ning developers would answer my queries about this issue.

I love teaching w/ the tool and it works well for the class. It means more work for me on the set-up and adding in of my roster since the tool is not supported by the university, but I don't mind.

[Camila Guadalupe Cortea]

Hello Mary! Thank you very much for your reply. I find it very interesting the use you give Ning at University level, I am taking a course in college that involves working with Ning too. Thank you, again, for sharing this information!