BP2_Toonti

Toonti allows you to build customizable and personal social networks

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Toonti is a Web 2.0 tool that provides a platform to build personalized social networks on any topic imaginable.  Since my Challenge Based Research (CBR) project will deal with motivating elementary band students to practice at home, I decided to give Toonti a test run by setting up a social group that the students in my cohort might choose to use in the process.

My iPractice Community home.

One great thing about Toonti is that its basic layout and typesetting is reminiscent of an old version of Facebook, which students of all ages certainly love to use.  As well, creating the iPractice home overall was reasonably simple.  I was happy with the default setup, which included functional bulletins, journals, blogs, event calendars, and even a suggestion box, so for now rather than rearranging the site, I added posts to a number of the areas.  As you can see in the photo, the bulletins section can be used to distribute practice assignments, while the journal area will allow students to create a practice journal to chart their weekly practice habits.  The group also included a blog area, where questions and important topics can be posted for student discussion.  Adding a custom banner proved to be the only difficult part, as it isn't readily stated anywhere that the default size for a custom banner should be 1000 x 300, and the crop function in the Design Wizard was a bit awkward to resize and move around.

Toonti's management options provide administrative control.

As I was setting up the social network with the intent of it being used by students, I was naturally concerned about the site's privacy settings and administrative controls.  Fortunately, the group can be set to private, as can user profiles.  Also, the management menu allows restrictions to be placed on what content users can upload and edit, and offers notifications for when comments or posts are made.

Further exploration showed that the social networks Toonti creates are fully customizable, from colors, to fonts, menus, layout and more.  Or, if the included options aren't enough, Toonti is also compatible with both embedded HTML snippets and custom CSS.

The only drawback of Toonti was that it is still in its beta phase, so sometimes a few buttons didn't function as expected, and some of the functions were difficult to find.  But even though it is still young, Toonti opens the door to a number of options for designing a social network for students to use at home in conjunction with practicing an instrument.  I'm aware that there are a number of other Web 2.0 tools that exist to create social networks for students, so if you know of one that may offer more, or a cleaner interface, feel free to leave a message in the comments.