Today we are going to deal with this social networking service. You must be asking yourself why a teacher would dare to think of using this in the classroom. Well, it’s not such a crazy idea! As I said in some previous posts, this year I’ve been doing the teaching practice and this last semester I’ve been teaching at a Secondary School.
Everything went well, except when I asked them to do their homework, they never did it. I didn’t know what to do to remind them to do it. I was desperate. I told my teacher about my problem and she told me that the previous student teacher used Facebook to keep in touch with the students and to remind them of their homework. GREAT IDEA!
I asked my friend to add me as an administrator of the group she had with the class. She did so, and then I started to make changes on the group. They had worked with another unit in the book so the group had a different topic. What I made was to change the group profile photo, and I left the first message telling them that I’ll be posting there some things, such as news, reminders, jokes, pictures, etc.!
Facebook changed their behaviour a lot, I mean, they started to do their homework, as they didn’t have another option - I could see if they saw my posts, which is a great advantage of the groups in Facebook, different from moodle, or Edmodo where you cannot check if your students see the messages you left them. Besides that, I could upload the videos we had worked on in previous lessons, so they could have them on their netbooks.
Since the unit we dealt with was cinema, short videos taken from movies were really helpful – and Movie Maker, too!!! (I’ll talk about it in a following post). Another advantage is that Facebook is more familiar to them than Edmodo for example, and helps you, the teacher, to make a stronger bond with your students – I noticed they really liked using it!
You can also ask them to upload their works there, this wasn’t my case, but it’s another thing you can do with it. Besides, you give an important and valuable use to their netbooks, which they only see as a tool or gadget to play with, search on the Internet, and nothing else.
So, don’t be afraid of using Facebook, it can help you a lot!!!!
Everything went well, except when I asked them to do their homework, they never did it. I didn’t know what to do to remind them to do it. I was desperate. I told my teacher about my problem and she told me that the previous student teacher used Facebook to keep in touch with the students and to remind them of their homework. GREAT IDEA!
I asked my friend to add me as an administrator of the group she had with the class. She did so, and then I started to make changes on the group. They had worked with another unit in the book so the group had a different topic. What I made was to change the group profile photo, and I left the first message telling them that I’ll be posting there some things, such as news, reminders, jokes, pictures, etc.!
Facebook changed their behaviour a lot, I mean, they started to do their homework, as they didn’t have another option - I could see if they saw my posts, which is a great advantage of the groups in Facebook, different from moodle, or Edmodo where you cannot check if your students see the messages you left them. Besides that, I could upload the videos we had worked on in previous lessons, so they could have them on their netbooks.
Since the unit we dealt with was cinema, short videos taken from movies were really helpful – and Movie Maker, too!!! (I’ll talk about it in a following post). Another advantage is that Facebook is more familiar to them than Edmodo for example, and helps you, the teacher, to make a stronger bond with your students – I noticed they really liked using it!
You can also ask them to upload their works there, this wasn’t my case, but it’s another thing you can do with it. Besides, you give an important and valuable use to their netbooks, which they only see as a tool or gadget to play with, search on the Internet, and nothing else.
So, don’t be afraid of using Facebook, it can help you a lot!!!!
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