Abstract:

In the latest years, the social networks have revolutionized the way that users establish relationships among them and share personal information, acquiring great importance in our society and becoming part of these networks millions of users around the world.
Education could not remain indifferent to this great social movement that has affected the communication of people so quickly and intensely. The school has the responsibility for including in their training practices the new technologies that will form an important part of the future of students and, indeed, social networks enter into that category. Moreover, they can be used to develop both their teaching and their social activities. Due to this fact, several types of social networks that can be used in the field of education have emerged, offering different features to the user.
This paper describes the types of existing social networks (namely, we can classify them into horizontal and vertical social networks), the main advantages and disadvantages that they can provide when we apply them to teaching and, finally, justifies why vertical social networks are more suitable for education than horizontal social networks such as Facebook or Tuenti. For this reason, we have made a comparative study of the major vertical social networks that can be applied to teaching practice. Namely, among vertical social networks we have analyzed three generic social networks (Ning, SocialGO and Grou.ps), that is, they can be use for different purposes, and one social network specific for education (Edmodo). For the evaluation of the four mentioned social networks, we have carried out a study of the most important characteristics this kind of networks should support when we use them in an educational environment. These features have been divided into four generic groups, and they are as follows: socialization, which corresponds to the characteristics associated with the ability to relate to the users of the network; communication, which corresponds to the characteristics associated to the possibilities that the users have to communicate in the network; multimedia, which corresponds to the characteristics associated with the multimedia capabilities that are available to the user of the network; and finally teaching, which refers to the characteristics associated with the academic aspects that are available to the users of the network and the possibilities for parents to be informed about them.
Once the different groups of features have been analyzed in each social network, we make a discussion about the results that we have obtained and we assess the different social networks. This analysis allows us to determine, depending on the scenario, which of them are the most appropriate for its use in education.

Keywords:

Social networks, evaluation.