Facebook in the classroom…

One of the more popular topics I have come across when researching Web 2.0 in the classroom is the use of the popular social networking website, Facebook. I have already made one post about Facebook in the classroom, but now that I have spent so many more hours on it, I think I can make a better comment about it and its use in education. It has quickly become a popular way of finding old friends, sharing photos, sending messages, creating online invitations to special events and even just ‘poking’. For these reasons (except maybe the poking), Facebook opens itself to the classroom, but above all reasons, it is very popular.

It is the fact that everyone can be together in one online place. It is easy to use, and there aren’t the long download times that are experienced for many MySpace pages. As I mentioned before, there is the option of creating a class group (for example, “Year 10 Australian History”) and this group can be made private so that an administrator (ie., the teacher) must approve all people who wish to join the group. The groups allow sharing of basic messages and even pictures. Videos and audio can also be embedded, or linked to. So easily, just by creating a group, we have looked at how Facebook incorporates the five basic components of multimedia – text, graphics, hyperlinks, video and audio. That is what will engage students – graphics and videos, not just plain text like this post is becoming!

There is a lot of information on the web – more than there has ever been before, and it is important that students are able to share these links with one another. Collaboration is important. Learning cannot be “just about who scores the highest grade”, but who gains the most from their experience. Learning something once for the sake of completing an assignment or homework task is not deep enough learning. For this reason, I believe students should share good websites they find with one another, and what better place than a Facebook discussion group?!

 One feature I have been impressed with on Facebook are the event invitations. Sure, a group administrator has the option of messaging all members in that group, but are students necessarily going to read every message sent? The event invitations, while they might not be the most appropriate way, are a way of reminding students about assessment tasks or certain events at school. Not only do they receive a nice little notification when logging in to Facebook, but they will also receive an email reminder. Again, it is something different, something still new to students and if they are using Facebook as much as a lot of my friends and I do, these notifications are hard to just ignore! Whether the student accepts the invitation (or rejects it as a joke), the teacher can acknowledge that they have heard about it.

There are of course distractions, and lots of them, on Facebook! It appears these distractions, such as poking, car racing, building online aquariums and even Scrabulous (online version of the popular board game Scrabble) that is what puts teachers off using Facebook in the classroom – and that is understandable! I could not say this for every student, but wouldn’t those little notifications off to the right eventually be in the way?! In other words, I believe many students after poking one another enough times would eventually realise they have a set task and need to do that – the advantage is, the task is a few clicks away and not in a book at the bottom of their bag or accidently left in their locker!

The best tasks to set with Facebook are of course collaborative tasks. Group work that involves the use of other Web 2.0 tools and then bringing it all together on the class’ Facebook group. As I mentioned before, this could be any type of media – text, graphics, hyperlinks, videos or audio. The Facebook groups allow for this to be added.

Other smaller tasks may involve students searching for images on certain topics – let us say history. You could have students searching for different topics of pictures and then sharing them with the group.

I think there is a lot more to say about Facebook and its use in education. I will hope to find more out about it, and if anyone has any other ideas, just send me a comment