Using Facebook for online learning

How would you use Facebook to teach a class?

In the classroom, Facebook can be used to assist and lead learning. To begin with, a special class group could be set up by the teacher to allow all students to join the group and participate. For example, this group may be called “Year 9 IT at [School Name]”. The groups are very easy to join, and the students would be mostly familiar with the technology. If the students are not familiar with online resources such as Facebook, they are likely to pick it up very quickly being a younger generation, more used to interactive and Web 2.0 sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Google.

Key points for the online learning include:

• The online work must be creative
• The online work must be collaborative – work as a group (such as in a wiki)
• The online work must be different – not just plain text, but multiple medias such as YouTube and Pictures and implement other various Web 2.0 tools. Any implementation of Web 2.0 tools makes the website far more interactive and interesting to students.
• The online work must finally be structured. For example, on a wiki (like my group’s wiki http://edugroupies.pbwiki.com) the information can be separated into different pages.

A system of trust and confidence must be in place. This helps to allow all students to contribute to the online classroom. The administrator of the group (ie. The teacher) has the control to remove ‘friends’ who are not students in the class. This helps to respect the privacy of the students. The teacher can also monitor which students are contributing.