Here There and Everywhere

Facebook isn’t just a great way for you to find old friends or learn about what’s happening this weekend, it is also an incredible learning tool. Teachers can utilize Facebook for class projects, for enhancing communication, and for engaging students in a manner that might not be entirely possible in traditional classroom settings. Read on to learn how you can be using Facebook in your classroom, no matter if you are a professor, student, working online, or showing up in person for class.

Class Projects
The following ideas are just a starting point for class projects that can be used with Facebook in the classroom.
1. Follow news feeds. Have students follow news feeds relevant to the course material in order to keep current information flowing through the class.

2. Share book reviews. Students can post their book reviews for the instructor to grade and other students to read. If it’s a peer-reviewed project, then students can more easily access each other’s papers online.

3. Knighthood. Playing this game promotes strong reading skills. This teacher explains how he used it with his ESL class.

4. Poll your class. Use polls as an interactive teaching tool in class or just to help facilitate getting to know one another with the Poll app for Facebook.

5. Practice a foreign language. Students learning a foreign language can connect with native speakers through groups or fan opportunities such as this one.

6. Create your own news source. A great way for journalism students to practice their craft, use the Facebook status update feed as a breaking news source for sports results, academic competition results, and other campus news.

7. Follow news stories. Keep up with news through Facebook on groups like World News Webcast that provides video clips of world news.

8. Keep up with politicians. Political science students can become fans of politicians in order to learn about their platforms and hear what they have to say first hand.

9. Create apps for Facebook. A class at Stanford started doing this in 2007 and still has a Facebook group profiling their work. A class at Berkeley also did the same.

10. Participate in a challenge. Look for challenges like the one held by Microsoft and Direct Marketing Educational Foundation that challenges undergrads and grad students to create usable products for Microsoft in return for experience and, in some cases, certification.

11. Bring literature to life. Create a Facebook representation of a work of literature like this class did.

Facilitate Communication

An excellent way to ensure students are more engaged in the learning experience is by strengthening the communication between students and student-to-teacher. These are just a few ideas to do just that.

12. Create groups. You can create groups for entire classes or for study groups with smaller subsets of students that allow for easy sharing of information and communication, without students even having to friend each other.

13. Schedule events. From beginning of semester mixers to after-finals celebrations, easily schedule events for the entire class using Facebook.

14. Send messages. From unexpected absences to rescheduling exams, it’s easy to send messages through Facebook.

15. Share multimedia. With the ability to post videos, photos, and more, you can share multimedia content easily with the entire class.

16. Post class notes. Post notes after each class period for students to have access for review or in case they were absent.

17. Provide direct communication with instructors. Instructors and students can contact each other through Facebook, providing an opportunity for better sharing of information and promoting better working relationships.