How educational institutions can benefit from social media
- Improving the connection between stakeholders - students, teachers and parents
- Increasing cross-border collaboration among student groups and classes
- Instigating online projects for students
- Tracking and monitoring student output by both teachers and parents
- Ease in organizing student club events, sports tournaments, etc
- Understanding the students’ learning environment and interests
What it means to own your online community
zeedna allows you to create a privacy-secure closed online community. Your community members, whether they are students, teachers, or parents, can create accounts on your site, perso
nal custom built profiles, invite friends, share videos, photos, post events, blogs, join focus groups and connect to other community members and communicate on the site to further your institution’s outreach and integration capacity.
Benefiting from owning your online community
- Ownership of media libraries vs. Facebook where they own assets on the site
- Stakeholders communicate and collaborate directly (teachers and students, students and parents, parents and teachers)
- Multilingual content
- Instructing student discussions through a question and answer feature
- Signing up for calendar events, whether its class activities or workshops, organized and controlled by date and time
- Send messages to the entire social community with regular updates or a segment of the community (for example to all students, teachers, and parents, or selectively)
- Start forum discussions online, sharing learning experiences with other community members
- Following up on what’s been achieved, monitor content, track progress and outputs.
Facebook vs the zeedna community
A zeedna community is a privacy-secure closed community, allowing students to feel the comfort and familiarity in sharing their learning experiences using the same tools and functionality that exists on Facebook, which initially started out as a platform for university students expanding to include anyone that wanted to join. As a closed community, zeedna, unlike Facebook and other open networking channels, secures against online predators getting in, which is a relief for parents and teachers alike.
Unlike Facebook, where all the information you publish is owned by them, zeedna on the other hand gives you the ability to own and manage your own community and data, facilitating interaction with your community under your brand. zeedna also allows you through using analytics, to analyze this information on the backend, understand community behavior and create more targeted messages for them, which is not the case for Facebook.
Case studies
Buzoor
Buzoor, a distribution company that intends to foster the love of the Arabic language among children through engaging reading material, launched its branded and multilingual community site in November 2010 through zeedna.
This social networking site allows users who are fond of the Arabic language or those who want to raise children that appreciate it to connect with each other through the following - a member section where friends can be reque
sted and messages sent to fellow members, participating in organized events posted on the site, creating and joining focus groups, blogging on personal interests and experiences, posting and updating photos
and related videos. This community driven site establishes deeper relationships between these different individuals, which in-turn would further the success of the organization in meeting its target goals, in expanding awareness, knowledge and ways of solving a given problem.
zeedna also provides tiered community management rights to moderate content and manage members. Site managers thus have administrative rights and can send messages to all members, create events and invite all these members along with people from the external community to attend and confirm.
Build your community on zeedna and use its many features to expand your network and maximize your reach.
Injaz-UAE
INJAZ-UAE is a partnership between the business community, educators and volunteers who are all working together to inspire young people to succeed in a global economy. This organization seeks volunteers from the business world to mentor students on three themes - entrepreneurship, work-readiness and financial literacy skills.
How INJAZ-UAE uses zeedna:
zeedna built Injaz’s static site in addition to a comprehensive and customized volunteer managment system (VMS) with many user friendly modules and features.
Benefits of INJAZ-UAE’s online community (VMS):
- Creating an attractive platform for volunteers and Injaz’s staff to engage and interact
- Easing the volunteer sign up process through the zeedna event module. With a click of a button, one or multiple calendar events (orientation session, training session, others) can be booked
- Making use of the management feature by zeedna which allows Injaz’s staff to keep track of the classrooms and volunteer sessions
- Displaying and sharing Information through the zeedna profile, blog and custom modules, which helps Injaz’s staff match up volunteers with students, hence reducing time and increasing overall communication
