Facebook as an Instructional Technology Tool

Can the wildly popular social network be used constructively in the classroom? This student’s story says it can.

Yesterday, student Kristen Nicole Cardon submitted a comment in response to my post 5 Reasons Why Educators Need To Embrace Internet Technologies in which she explained how she used Facebook in a course she took. I really appreciated her well stated discussion of how Facebook was used in the course and how the approach succeeded (slightly edited in the following excerpt).

“In my British Literary History course last winter semester, my professor created a class facebook group which we all joined. We’d finish our reading for class and then get online and write a paragraph about what we’d read, focusing our comments on the specific course aims that my professor had created for the class. We would then go to class where my professor would note the ways in which we’d covered the material well and he’d teach anything we missed as well as anything else he wanted us to know.

This way of conducting class was effective because:

1. We were socially motivated to complete the reading and contribute to the online discussion.

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