Facebook’s roots may be
planted in college campuses, but classrooms have not welcomed the social
network as eagerly as their students have. Once a Harvard startup open only to
college students, Facebook has been pegged as a waste of time, a classroom
disruption and a bad habit that is correlated with low grades. Missouri even
went so far as to ban Facebook and other social media relationships between
teachers and students (the law was later repealed).
But teachers such as
Reynol Junco — who recently published a study that shows certain types of
Facebook use are correlated with higher GPAs — are beginning to look at
ways that they can use Facebook to their advantage.
“Students are already
very familiar with the platform and spend a lot of time on the site,” Junco
says. “Because of this, there is usually a good amount of activity [in class
related Facebook discussions] because students receive notifications of new
group posts in a timely fashion (something that doesn’t happen with Learning
Management Systems).”
Here are tips from
Junco and other teachers on how to effectively use Facebook in the classroom.
1. Use Facebook With a Focus
“Instead of telling
your students, ‘Hey, we are going to use Facebook for this course,’” Junco
says, “it’s important to frame Facebook use in a way that will make sense. For
instance, you could say ‘we are going to use a Facebook group in order to
interact with each other, discuss course topics, and share links of interest.”
Once teachers decide
how they’re going to use Facebook, they need to follow through in a way that
takes class participation on the social network seriously. Junco’s research
suggests that social media efforts in the classroom are most effective when
they are mandatory and impact grades.
2. Friend With Caution
Regardless of whether
the legislation was justified, there’s a reason that Missouri banned social
media friendships between teachers and students. In many cases it’s not any
more appropriate for teachers and students to hang out after school on the
Internet than it is in reality. Not to mention that both parties can feel
uncomfortable when social networks make their lives outside of the classroom
accessible in a classroom context.
Fortunately, you don’t
have to be Facebook friends to interact on Facebook. In a guide produced in
partnership with Facebook, Facebook for Educators, Facebook expert Linda
Fogg Phillips, educational media consultant Derek Baird and behavior
psychologist BJ Fogg recommend using Groups and Pages to communicate with
students:
- Groups: Members of groups do not need to be Facebook friends, but each person in the group receives a message when any member posts to the group. Groups can be either “open,” “closed,” or “secret.” Phillips, Baird and Fogg recommend that teachers create closed groups, which means that the content of the group is private. Be aware that the list of group members will still be public unless you choose the “secret” option.
- Pages: “In an educational setting we believe that interaction between students and teachers should be open, transparent and secure,” the authors say. “Pages on Facebook are good for this.” Pages are public. Anybody can like the page in order to get updates in their news feeds from its administrator. In an educational setting, they can be used to compile relevant current events and additional resources for students. Features such as comments and notes allow students to add conversation and content to pages even if they are not administrators of the page.
3. Use a Facebook Group
In addition to using
Facebook groups in his own classes, Junco has conducted research on how they
can be incorporated into learning most effectively. Here are some Facebook
group activities that his research has suggested are effective:
- Continuing class discussions
- Giving students who might be intimidated in a class setting a low-stress way to ask questions
- Providing students academic and personal support
- Helping students connect with each other and organize study groups
4. Use a Facebook Page
Because Facebook pages
are open to the public and anybody can subscribe to their content, they are
typically used differently than Facebook groups in educational settings. They
often become interactive resources rather than a setting for intimate
discussion.
Dr. Neil Hammerschlag
runs a program at the University of Miami that exposes students to ocean field
research (including work with sharks) and he has found Facebook Pages a useful
tool for both staying in touch with research updates and expanding the number
of students he can reach.
“We expose over 1,000
kids each year to ocean research,” he says. “But we want to work with more
students. You can’t bring that many with you, but we can bring the ocean to
them.”
Hammerschlag Uses
Facebook to post research findings, videos and photos of weekly shark trips. He
also posts recent articles about ocean science.
5. Consider Other Alternatives
Children under the age
of 13 aren’t legally permitted Facebook accounts, and its common for school
districts to block access to the social network. If you are teaching young
children or simply don’t feel comfortable using Facebook with students, there
are still several free options that might fit your needs:
- Edmodo, like Facebook, allows teachers and students to share ideas, files and assignments on a communal wall. Teachers can organize different groups of students and monitor them from the same dashboard. Once they’ve organized classes, they can post assignments to the wall and grade them online. They can then archive the class groups and begin new ones.
- Collaborize Classroom gives teachers four discussion format choices. Students can either agree or disagree with a statement, answer a multiple choice question, post responses, or have the choice between adding a new response or voting for someone else’s response. Teachers can add photos or videos to their prompts and all of the discussions take place on one class page.
- Edublogs is a WordPress-like blogging platform that only supports educational content and thus, unlike WordPress, usually isn’t blocked by school filters. Since 2005, it has hosted more than a million blogs from students and teachers.
- Kidblog is a bit more specific than Edublogs. There are fewer options to adjust the appearance of the main page, and it’s hard to use the platform for anything other than as a system for managing individual class blogs. The homepage serves as a catalog of student blogs on the right with a recent post feed on the left.
Having said that, if
you want to introduce individual class blogs to your K-8 classroom, this is the
perfect tool for it. The interface is easier to navigate than Edublogs, and you
can generate user names and passwords for students, teachers, administrators,
and guests with a couple of intuitive clicks. Teachers are able to edit and
remove any of their students’ posts.
Teachers can also control how private they want the
blogs to be. They can keep them student-and-teacher only, allow parents to log
in with a password, or make them open to the public.
December
06, 2011
by
Mashable
Social Media, http://mashable.com/2011/12/05/educators-on-facebook
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