THis year as a way to get to know my students for the forst day of a summer school program, we created a Ning network where every student created there own personal page on the school centered secure network. I went around to each student in each classroom, and took pictures of each student. Each student then had to create there own personal page upon login that answered various questions about themselves and their learning to share with others.
On the main page of the network, they had to post a reply to a question that asked them to tell everyone about themselves. Each child then had to reply to at least on person's post with a positive comment about them.

I then went around to each group and asked them to introduce there group and tell us about what they were doing using video to post on the Ning site.

THis summer program was part of a Literature Circle group who was reading books and sharing with others.Teachers would post questions about the reading and students were required to not only answer the questions but also reply to other student's questions as well.

The students were then given the opportunity to create a glog using www.glogster.com or a cartoon using www.pixton.com or www.toondoo.com to share with each other something they had learned in the program or extend what they were reading from there book. Some students even used www.xtranormal.com to cread movie scripts of the book they were reading.

The students were super engaged and extremely excited about learning. They would often go home at night and continue work on wjhat they were doing. They learned about safe social networking, embedding code and much more besides just reading books for pleasure.