Social Networking for Students

Social media is also used for learning. It is useful for students and learners. Nowadays students, teachers and parents are creating their digital learning platforms.

Here is the ultimate list of popular free social networks for learning purposes. It helps students in effective learning.

Contents

1. Youtube :
2. TED :
3. Quora :
4. Stack Overflow :
5. Stumbleupon :
6. Yahoo Answers :
7. Medium :
8. Reddit :
9. Digg :
10. Internet Archive :

1.YouTube :

YouTube is the best video sharing platform and allows users to upload, watch, comment, like and share videos on YouTube. It has billions of videos.

It was founded on February 14, 2005 by three former PayPal employees and was later acquired by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion. It has over 1 billion visitors per month and is the second most popular search engine.

It is available worldwide. Any user can create a YouTube channel and anyone can be a channel owner. They can upload videos and showcase them to their friends and followers.

YouTube allows anyone to advertise on this platform to reach out. It has offered a paid membership option for premium users without any advertising.

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Now it offers YouTubeTV, a special live streaming subscription service. It also has parental controls for children watching videos.

Pros:

• Many hours of entertainment.
• Interact with communities of followers.
• Active comment areas.
• Easy to find others with common interests.

Cons:

• Less personal than other social sites.
• The overwhelming volume of information.

2. TED :

If you don't know about TED, it's time to find out. TED is a website that hosts over 2,300 talks. It has a wide range of topics to talk about, from technology, business, economics, design, science, and global issues.

There is a huge collection of science and technology, business, and economics videos. TED-Ed is constantly looking for talented educators.

Some TED Talks are funny and some are emotional. Some talks are about explaining how the brain works, and others are mainly about entertainment. One thing that is common to all TED videos is that they are memorable.

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If you have little time to watch, the TED website is also good for short videos. The videos are less than six minutes long and are tagged with an easy-to-see red bar.

TED is a well-known non-profit organization dedicated to spreading the ideas of the world’s greatest thinkers. TED talks are truly inspiring. Teachers first started using them in classrooms but TED talks were not aimed solely at a school audience.

Pros:

• 2300 talks covering.
• Many topics covered.
• talks are funny and emotional.
• Shorter videos for time-squeezed persons.
• ideas of the world’s greatest thinkers

Cons:

• Don’t have cons to mention

3. Quora :

Quora is a social network where users can get answers to their posted questions. It is a question and answer platform.

Quora is a knowledge-gathering social network that is based on asking and answering questions. It has over 200 million users as of January 2018.

Human questions lead to the creation and launch of Quora in June 2009. The website was founded by two former Facebook employees, Charlie Cheever and Adam D'Angelo.

Quora now receives more than 80 million unique visitors per month. Half of Quora's visitors come from the US. The question and answer website has raised $141 in venture capital funds.

It is a large community of open-minded people. Quora membership is free; you can start asking any question. Many students use Quora to get answers on general topics like history, math, English, health, and many more, but you need to verify the accuracy of the answer. Other members vote up and down, which helps analyze the correct answers.

Pros :

• Learn every day.
• You will know great people.
• You can actually get some good friends.
• You will get the surprise of friend questions.
• It gives value for passing time.
• You get to ask and some anonymously.

Cons:

• You get a little scolding from your mother while you eat.
• You don’t get to send a friend request for someone.
• The user interface is a little annoying.
• You have to select proper topics else you find yourself in the wrong sector of quora.
• You can’t leave it once you are in.

4. Stack Overflow:

Stack Overflow is a question and answer site dedicated to answering inquiries about programming. It focuses primarily on programming. Specific questions about parts of code or the mechanisms of how it works.

Upvotes and downvotes determine how much visibility each person gets. Stack Overflow is a private, secure home for your questions and answers.

Pros:

• Better documentation.
• Collaboration is cheaper in the long run.
• Saves time answering questions multiple times.

Cons:

• If you succeed in answering good questions, you will graduate to Enterprise.
• People have to actually use it for coding.

5. Stumbleupon:

StumbleUpon focuses on content discovery and recommends it to its users. It is an intelligent social networking platform. You can also discover webpages, images, videos, etc.

You can also rate it based on your interest. It also provides a toolbar on standard browsers. It is mainly used for information and entertainment.

It was founded on June 30, 2018. Now it is being moved to the Mix. It has over 25 million users. It is mainly used for entertainment and information. There are over 80,000 publishers, brands, and other marketers. It was owned by eBay from May 2007 to April 2009.

Note: It has now moved to mix.com

Pros:

• Users rating and Comments.
• Build a Network of Friends.

Cons:

• Time Consuming.

6. Yahoo Answers:

Yahoo Answers is a question and answer website. Sometimes Yahoo Answers can vary in quality. It only has quantity. It is rare to find good answers to your question.

Answers are rated by visitors and the best answers are displayed first in the feed. It is a very popular community like Quora.

Y

ahoo Answers has millions of users and thousands of questions are asked and answered every day. All questions are categorized so that you can easily search for your relevant topic or category.

Pros:

• Many points of views for one questions.
• You are able to see people’s perspectives.
• You can ask any question.
• You are able to get answers.
• You are able to look at past answers.
• You are able to enjoy the resources provided by Yahoo.

Cons:

• Many different people with different levels of education.
• Many people do not show their intelligence.
• You might not get a reply on your question within 3 days or more.
• The replies that you get may not be at the college level.
• Replays may not be helpful sometimes.

7. Medium:

Medium is the largest social network for reading and writing. Medium's content is republished from original content. It has 60 million users.

Medium is a free online publishing platform for reading most articles. Some articles are for paid members.

Pros:

• Exposure and views.
• A great content management system.
• The social angle.

Cons:

• Less Control.
• Less potential for lead generation.
• Fewer numbers and analytics.
• Can’t Leverage SEO.

8. Reddit:

Reddit is a social networking website for news and entertainment. It is a content sharing network. Content can be text or links. Registered users of Reddit can submit content such as direct links, text, images, and discussion.

Members vote on content to determine the popularity of a post. Users can also determine their position on the site's page by voting up and down submissions.

The most positively voted submissions appear in the top category or main page. It was founded on June 23, 2005 by the University of Virginia. Over 36 million registered accounts have been added over a decade later. It has approximately 500 million monthly visits.

Pros:

• Extremely easy to use.
• Not as focused on mainstream news headlines.

Cons:

• Some articles don't agree.
• Mostly unmoderated.
• Some titles could be not safe for work.

9.Digg:

Digg is a social media platform for news. It features news, articles, and videos from other major media sources. It curates stories specifically for the internet audience.

Most topics range from trending political issues, science, and anything viral on the internet. It supports sharing content to other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp.

Users can mine articles or news to make them visible to other users. It was founded in November 2004. It has 11 million active monthly users in 2015.

Pros:

• The social platform for useful news.
• Article and videos from major media.
• Share to other platforms.

Cons:

• No response from users i.e. comment and likes.
• Many cases will crash your server or down.

10. Internet Archive:

The Internet Archive is a standard website for storing originals from various large websites. It can store anything from websites.

American libraries have a free book collection that is directly linked to the college website. The student can download it from the Internet Archive website.

This is one of the best websites that provides free and accessible knowledge, but it does not provide access to learning or certifications.

The Internet Archive website is also known as the Wayback Machine. It can be used to search past websites of the Internet. It has more than 310 billion web pages archived in a kind of digital time capsule. It is preserved in the same way they first appeared.

Pros:

• Access to information.
• Access to learning.
• Globalization.

Cons:

• Unable to check new small websites.

Last Updated: 30 March 2019

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