Abstract:

School is facing today a central problem: on the one hand it aims to educate literary citizens, active and responsible, on the other hand, it competes with media, a parallel school to which students devote more time than to the traditional one and to their family (Potter, 2005).

The competition is held by all media with no exception, either they are the old or traditional ones (press, radio, television), or the so-called new or digital (internet, mobile phone, videogames). The question is no longer on the time students devote to the media, but also in the effects that its use, specially the new ones, have at the learning level (Gee, 2010).
Until the emergence of the Web 2.0 the question did not arise so accurately, because what was at stake were the effects (positive and negative) of media messages consumption. Media communication was made from one to many and ordinary citizens could rarely express themselves through the media.
With the development of the Web 2.0, the paradigm of media communication has changed. Today, the communication is made from many to many, so it is no longer important just to train the future citizens to be critical consumers of media messages, but also reflexive producers. We live in the era of “prosumers” (Komoski, 2007), a term imported from Toffler, not at an economic outlook but in terms of information, once the ordinary citizen is, at the same time, consumer and information producer in different formats but particularly in the digital one.
The school must be able to offer pedagogical activities in order to foment not only the individual learning, but also the social one.
Our work aims to understand how the youngsters of 2nd and 3rd cycles of basic education use the social networks, perceive their performance in the social networks and relate to their peers and other groups in the social networks.

Our main Objectives are:

1. To characterize the use of social media services by young people of 2nd and 3rd cycles.

2. To understand how these youngsters:
- Use the social media services;
- Perceive their performances on these networks: at a technical, and content level (analysis and production);
- How they relate with their peers;
- How they relate with other groups (e.g. family, school…)

3. To understand how teachers of 2nd and 3rd cycles:
- Use the social media services;
- Perceive the use of social media services by their students;
- Consider important, or not, the use of social media services to improve their students learning (formal or non-formal).

To reach our objectives we are going to do quantitative research through a questionnaire to students, and qualitative research through an interview with teachers.

Keywords:

Social networks, media, media literacy.