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

Create engaging activities

Teachers who create engaging activities immediately will reduce the chances of major disruptions in the classroom. For example, Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) can be used to cater for the visual learning intelligence while students who enjoy writing may prefer mainly using a wordpress weblog (http://www.wordpress.com). Web 2.0 provides something new for students – a brand new experience in the classroom that they have not used in many other lessons. 

 Create collaborative activities

Students need to belong. Web 2.0 tools such as PBwiki (http://www.pbwiki.com) allows students to work together and develop their answers to a set question. If a teacher successfully uses PBwiki as a tool in the classroom, students will feel as though they belong and will not resort to seeking power, attention, revenge or avoidance of failure, as stated by Dreikurs. 

Using a variety of the Web 2.0 tools that are available will cater for the multiple intelligences. Animoto (http://www.animoto.com) is a great example of this as it allows for students to create and share their own videos accompanied by music. This goes beyond the basic level of writing. iGoogle (http://www.google.com/ig) is also a very useful tool for students to store all of their resources in a single location. This includes their documents through Google Docs, links and much more. By meeting these aspects, teachers will find that there should not be significant issues surrounding classroom management.

The Web 2.0 tools available also allows and emphasises collaboration between people. One example of this is the online mind-map software, Bubbl.us, as shown below (also available at http://bubbl.us). When using this software, users will notice that there is a column on the right hand side that specifically mentions “Collaborate”. This is very useful in learning and allows for students to share their ideas quickly and easily with their classmates.

Another very useful Web 2.0 tool in helping collaboration is Google Docs. This following video from YouTube, found at the blog: http://iteacher.edublogs.org/ demonstrates the many advantages of using Google Docs for collaboration.

The importance of collaboration is that it allows students to share with one another their knowledge and experiences. These Web 2.0 tools help students to achieve the sharing aspect, particularly if they find a website with very useful information or if they have some story or journal of a past experience.

ED2203 Major Essay

a)      http://mashton-ed2203.pbwiki.com/

b)      Five key issues that I struggled with in developing this project included:

a.      Involving the parents in an appropriate way                                                              

i.      As this project was to include both students and their parents, it was important for the parents to be involved in a constructive and meaningful way. In the end, I decided to allow parents to input their prior knowledge and experience into the project and also play an important role in the creation of the video – the main part of the project.

b.      Ensuring that all students can be involved                                                              

 i.      It was important in the project to develop a way of involving all students. This is a key element derived from Dreikurs’ theory of people, especially children, feeling the need to belong. If all students are involved in some way, they will feel a sense of achievement. All activities involved in the project allow for all students to be involved and experience Web 2.0 while learning about Digital Media.

c.       Making the project appropriate to the students’ lives                                                              

i.      It is important to make the project relevant to students’ lives so that they can bring their understanding and prior knowledge into the project. This also allows for sharing ideas and teaching one another.d.       

Creating a range of activities that would meet the outcomes and make use of technology                                                              

 i.      A problem I found when developing the project was how to meet the outcomes and make use of various Web 2.0 technologies. Meeting each aspect individually was okay; however, bringing these together and keeping a balance was essential. I thought that initially, my project would have been to much based around using Web 2.0 rather than learning about Digital Media.

e.      Making the project engaging to all                                                              

 i.      It is essential that the projects teachers develop are engaging to all students, but particularly group projects as a common problem is one student completing all the work by themselves, or only half of the group is working and the others feeling as though they can simply sit back and watch. All of the activities involved in the project that I developed ensured that every student and parent had to play some role, especially when it came to creating the video and discussing digital media.

c)      The collaborative nature of this group project is important because it allows for a variety of key points, including:

a.      Giving students a sense of place                                                              

 i.      It is through blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 tools that students are given a sense of place. Students can develop their blog or wiki to suit them and this can help to better express their ideas, as opposed to simply writing an essay.

b.      Making students feel as though they belong

                                                               i.      Web 2.0 helps to give students a sense of belonging, which is related to Dreikurs’ key human driver. Students can feel part of a group by the extensive forms of communication and sharing available through Web 2.0. Web 2.0 may also help students to communicate better if they are not as good with face to face communication, particularly in groups. Emails, using Wikis, blogs and Google Docs may be a more appropriate and effective means of communication for these people.

Bubbl.us (available from http://bubbl.us) is a great example of a Web 2.0 that caters for the visual and logical learning styles. It allows users to create mind maps online, free of charge and as a real bonus, be able to share them with friends on their friend list. This is exactly what Web 2.0 is about – it is a website not just about text, but imagery, also allowing users to contribute a large amount and share these with other people.

The other (more time consuming way of sharing mind maps) way is to create a mind map in software such as Inspiration – which is not free, and not every student has at home, and then to email the map to many people. Bubbl.us saves all of this time, and can do as much as software such as Inspiration.

(Thanks to http://kayc28.wordpress.com/ blog for finding this great software and sharing it with everyone!)

This video is a great demonstration of how to use iGoogle and RSS.