Among educators, Eric Sheninger is something of a social networking hero. Principal Eric Sheninger encourages new media at his school. The principal of New Milford N.J. High School has nearly 12,300 Twitter followers his handle: @NMHS_Principal. He and his teachers use Facebook to communicate with students and parents, and students use it to plan events. In class, teachers routinely ask kids to power up their cellphones to respond to classroom polls and quizzes. Rather than ban cellphones, Sheninger calls them “mobile learning devices. “He replaced the schools “static, boring” website with what has become a heavily used Facebook page, and his teachers encourage students to research, write, edit, perform and publish their work online.Sheninger is one of a growing number of educators who don’t just tolerate social networking in school — he encourages it, often for educational purposes. He says sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — long banned and roundly derided by many peers — actually push kids to do better work and pay attention to important issues such as audience, quality research and copyright laws.
About John RicardJohn is entering his 5th year of teaching and founded the Latin program at Somerset Academy. He has taught all levels of Latin, ranging from introductory levels to Latin III, and also currently teaches AP Art History and AP European History. He built Romae.org as an ancillary tool for his Latin students but is now expanding the project and has also built RicardAcademy.info to experiment with a social networking platform for his other courses. John has also been a founding consultant and instructor with Somerset Virtual Academy.
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John Ricard
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