Developing a social networking site to use for class management

The purpose of this study is to develop an educational social networking site for use in classroom management and then test it on a group of students to determine educational and general usability. In this research, an educational social networking site has been developed and published on www.mavikurdele.net for educators, students and parents. The educational social networking site which was developed in this study, has learning management systems' educational features like assignments, quizzes and file sharing as well as the social networking sites' characteristics. At the end of the developing process, the educational social networking site has been tested on 51 students from a high school in Uşak province of Turkey for six weeks. One shot case study method has been used and the data collected by scale of social networks' educational use, educational social network student usability opinion survey and log records of the site. Descriptive statistics are used in data analysis. As a result, students who used educational social network expressed that the educational features of social networking sites is useful for communication, collaboration, sharing of educational materials, and has appealing design for that age group.