Facebook in Teaching & Learning: Meeting the Net Generation on Their Level

Without a doubt, we live in the age of Facebook. Its millions of users attract millions more seemingly every day as easier access to technology and internet proliferate modern day life. The social firestorm that it is has not come without controversy. Private lives become more and more public and the question of personal privacy and property becomes increasingly muddled. Many peers my age have thought critically about de-activating their Facebook accounts in attempt to reclaim themselves from the public sphere. Already having graduated high school and having laid the foundations for our adult identities when Facebook first emerged, we can easily recall the simpler days before Facebook’s arrivals and sometimes even long for them. Those just a few years younger than us who are definitively considered to be kids of the Net Generation, however, have never known a world without social networking defining their adolescence. Herein lies the challenge for adults, parents, and teachers raising up this generation to follow and forge new footsteps in the world.

Even a younger adult like me must re-adjust her expectations about how these youth perceive the world. As an aspiring teacher, this burden is in some ways even greater as I must learn to try to make an old machine—the U.S. education system—remain contemporary and relevant to its users—students. Though not currently in a classroom, I do work with high-schoolers in a weekend mentoring program. At 15 and 16, they do not know life without Facebook since they were only 7 or 8 when Facebook first arrived. The irony is that this particular group of students was not even in the U.S. when Facebook hit since they are all recent immigrants. One can imagine how wide the socio-cultural, technological gap was when they first arrived in the U.S., and then wonder in amazement how quickly and easily they bridged it to become prolific users of the internet. In spite of their beginning proficiency in English, they chat, check-in with each other, share likes and dislikes, and articulate their hopes, dreams, and frustrations, illustrating an impressive fluency in this medium of communication. It is a tool that has allowed them to bridge the worlds of identity they balance between their new lives in the U.S. and their previous lives in their home countries. They wear their hearts on their Walls, and in order to strengthen our mentor-mentee relationships with them, as group leaders, we utilize Facebook to meet them on their level.

We share interesting news articles and resources about current events with our mentees, and also comment and joke with them. There are many photo albums full of funny pictures with equally entertaining captions. Managing this kind of online relationship with them is not a difficult task for most of the mentors since we are Facebook users ourselves, and our relationship with them is not such a formal one that overtones of being viewed as authority figures loom. But naturally, this kind of relationship may prove to be more difficult for classroom teachers who often struggle to maintain respectful student-teacher relationships in-person in their classrooms. Thus, the pros and cons for teachers of using Facebook in the same manner that we do needs additional consideration. While I am actually quite apprehensive of having this kind of online relationship with my future students and think it is precarious for a teacher to maintain, I have heard of teachers who manage it with great success.

Therefore, it should not be stricken from teachers' toolboxes as a way of facilitating teaching and learning, and even more so of fostering relationships, but it is a personal choice for each teacher depending on her or his level of comfort with the technology. I think what is possible and within reach of all teachers is finding a way to allow Facebook and other social networking tools to become a medium for student-centered, self-directed learning. However, students capable and mature enough to manage self-directed learning do not come out of thin air, so internet literacy and manners must be a part of classroom dialogue and teaching. This literacy is not just the responsibility of teachers to impart, but parents as well. Those less familiar with Facebook shy away from trying to understand it as a lens through which their youth view the world, but in doing so, we deprive them of skills needed to think critically and discern appropriate uses of this sometimes unwieldy medium. With our high-schoolers, mentors rarely hesitate to "call out" mentees when they use derogatory or hurtful language with their group peers on Facebook. While it is not the opportunity to lecture in full on the reasons why they should adjust their online behavior, it is still a veritable "teachable moment". In the classroom, these should not just be teachable moments, but standard parts of the curriculum, for instance in an English Language Arts class when students learn to manipulate character, voice, and perspective in their writing.

I agree that Facebook as it stands today may not be the best modality for teaching and learning, but teachers and parents much understand that it is a modality among adolescent learners that will not disappear any time soon. Therefore, they need to supply their students and children with the appropriate skills to manage this modality of life just as they might teach them to deal with writing an analytical argument in essays or financial responsibility at home. At its very core, Facebook is a tool for communication, and communication is at the heart of how we pass on our knowledge and history to future generations.

xtranormal

As a future educator in the modern age of technology, it is crucial to be able to maintain up-to-date knowledge on new technologies. Regarding Social Studies Education, teaching is no longer constrained to using textbooks, primary sources, and maps, but now we must incorporate technology as well. I investigated a media website that allows adolescents to not only use computers in the classroom, but learn historical figures and events as well.

As I searched the internet, I came across an interactive site, called xtranormal.com that will allow each of my students to create movies about history. For example, this allows students to build characters, write historical scripts, and make connections between historical figures. I thought that this site would be useful because it allows students who may be visual learners to create historical figures and scenarios using an online movie-making tool. To make sure this site would suit a 7^th grade social studies classroom, I made my own characters and scripts to practice.  I created a short movie of Theodore Roosevelt talking to Woodrow Wilson about their political views which I believe would be an excellent way for students to connect these Progressive presidents’ polices and platforms because they are able to see it firsthand.

            The website is set up for students to make videos, where they choose which historical figure on the site they would like to use. After they pick the historical character, they write a script that pertains to their character. The cartoon figures on the website then speak the script that was created by the students. In a way, this could be used as a jigsaw method of teaching, where each group presents their own characters to the class, which allows many historical characters to be covered in the class. Another positive aspect of the site is that after they complete the video, the students can share their work with their peers using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Adolescents today respond well to interacting with media in the classroom. Video-making websites are accessible and liked by today’s generation of students, because they are proficient in using these kinds of mediums. Since they use these technologies in their everyday life, a website like xrtanormal.com is a tool for teachers to embrace their student's
 natural abilities with computers. The visual nature of websites and technology today are ingrained in students daily life and we as teachers must adapt to the on going changes with in technology in order for our students to be successful.

Many teachers may be wary about using a site such as xtranormal.com due to the fact that students may not take it seriously. However, I believe if monitored correctly the website can be very effective. Not only is this useful for social studies literary strategies, but it
can be interdisciplinary as well. The students are forced to use their knowledge of history and then utilize that information into writing a script. Writing the script allows students to improve their writing andliteracy skills as well as improve their knowledge of history, revealing the interdisciplinary value of using technology in the classroom. For teachers, it is important to view the website and create practice videos before assigning this kind of project to their students. Lessons should not rely solely on this site, but be incorporated as an assessment or project-based assignment. Since adolescents today are more engaged with multi-media components, xtranormal.com allows for both excitement and learning in the classroom.

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Facebook in the classroom

Facebook has become the leading social network platform in the world. This media is now used for information sharing, marketing, business, identity platforms, social connections, dating and much more. As with anything that is used too much or too often, and just like many places in the world or in society, negative aspects do arise. The truth is, social networking is not going to disappear any time soon. So how do we as teachers channel positive energy into a medium that holds negative aspects, and how do we use this popular social network in our own teaching? Facebook, or social networking as a whole, has become one of the most controversial subjects surrounding adolescents. Because of the strong focus on the negative aspects of a platform like Facebook, the potential positive uses and learning potential has been greatly overlooked.
    As a future ESL teacher I can see this medium used in many ways. In the classroom, Facebook can be used as an information hub for the class and parents, where information on the class, assignments, resources and discussions can be held collectively to further provide educational tools inside and outside the classroom. Facebook use encourages, reading and writing in both a native or second language,  sharing of ideas across the globe, and cultural awareness i.e. language, customs, beliefs. I see using social network platforms, that some adolescents are already so familiar with, as a way to engage them in writing, reading and using the language in meaningful ways that help them to learn. Using these resources in the classroom also teaches valuable technology skills to students who may not have prior access. For bilingual students or recent immigrants, Facebook can be used to stay connected with the home country while also providing continued use of their first language.
    The most obvious dangers surrounding Facebook evolve from denial and restriction of use by parents, which can lead to an uninformed entrance to the world of Facebook by adolescents. Since so many schools and businesses today use Facebook as a filtering system, by highlighting strengths, we can help students build strong and positive Facebook platforms of themselves, and use Facebook like an extended media resume or portfolio of the self. By teaching children the dangers and consequences that result from poor choices made on the internet, we can begin to use these valuable resources as tools in the classroom and in society as a whole.
     As an introduction,  the class could create a page together, where the students learn of the various settings and rules, functions and components, and become familiar with the valuable amenities that the medium has to offer. With the knowledge we hold of how popular social networking cites like Facebook are, and the notion that they will be used by adolescents, we need to address the social fears and problems that are intertwined in the medium to teach our children how to safely and tactfully use these available resources, by discussing current events on the subject, and addressing students concerns and questions. By setting examples for effective and productive use of social networking, we can prevent many of the problems that cause so much of the negative critiques toward it. Therefore, the job and duty of parents and teachers is to bring the positives and the negatives to the forefront of a child's attention and channel energies into the more positive aspects. In the twenty first century technology and media are becoming more important in the daily lives of people. As teachers, it is our job to not only teach academic subject matter to our students, but also to teach life skills. With this ever growing dependency on technology to perform tasks and skills in the world, addressing these platform’s uses is a crucial life skill in today's day and age. The pros outweigh the cons when it comes to social networking platforms used by adolescents. Once we have effectively taught students how the media works and how they can use it productively in their lives, the education process can begin.

Twitter: Extension of Learning

Twitter: the micro-blogging platform that limits user posts to 140 characters or less. But it is more than just a micro-blog or a Web 2.0 platform. Twitter has evolved into a community—one that consists of countless subcultures—that connects users both locally and globally. These sub-cultures and sub-communities are often contextualized and differentiated using hashtags, which are denoted by using a preceding # sign. As a micro-blog, Twitter differs from other blogging platforms in that it is more fast-paced and conversational—one might even say that it combines blogging with instant messaging. This set-up makes interacting feel more genuine and less contrived than posting to a discussion board, or even a class blog. Twitter-users are constantly engaged in sharing, filtering, sorting, cataloging and archiving information.

How are adolescents using Twitter and how can Twitter be used in a class-setting? Not only are adolescents using Twitter to express and share their own ideas, but they also comment on local and global events and issues. They are building and shaping their identities through tweeting original content, retweeting (sharing something someone previously tweeted), and selecting tweets as favorites. In a class-setting, Twitter is ideal for encouraging participation and extension of learning. For example, using Twitter, a student who is generally quiet in class has the ability to transfer his or her internal thoughts and externalize them. Twitter encourages participation beyond just providing an alternative to raising one’s hand or offering verbal responses in class; it opens up opportunities for students to connect with other students, academics and professionals. They experience exposure to and participation in learning communities, in which the very things they are learning in class are tangible and relevant to real-life.

Teachers can create Twitter accounts specifically for certain classes they teach and use the account to post announcements or questions for students to think about and answer, expand upon class conversations, share relevant resources and other media—including websites, videos, pictures—that relates to the class. Students can also pose questions, share information and resources, and engage in collaborative learning. They are just as involved in exploring as the teacher. To guide and mediate class discussions online, teachers can implement hashtags for students to use when posting for class. Another useful feature is creating lists—these can be used to keep track of students participating in the Twitter conversations and can also serve as a resource of other Twitter users students can follow and interact with. All of these features contribute to teaching students the value and benefits of being part of a community, as well as how to be responsible digital citizens.

Some potential cons to using Twitter in class are that it might end up being more of a distraction. Twitter can be, and is, fun—students will be challenged to balance this sentiment with their academic work. There is the risk of students using Twitter for other purposes—including cyberbullying. Also, there is an issue of accessibility—some students may not have access to a computer or the Internet at home and might feel left out of this extension and exploration beyond the classroom. Because Twitter is a global social network, it is difficult for teachers to keep tabs on all of the personal connections students make beyond the class-use of Twitter. The Internet continues to be a hunting ground for things like identity theft and other scams. This provides a teaching opportunity to teach about discretion and the consequence of over-divulging on a public forum. When using Twitter for class purposes, teachers should model good digital citizenship practices and teach that as part of their lessons.

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YouTube

Adolescents, as a group, are incredibly active contributors to YouTube material. It is a platform with which nearly all students are familiar, and even if some are not, its user-friendliness makes it easy to bring students up to speed for use as a learning tool. Adolescents not only use YouTube to feel their thoughts are legitimate, but also to experiment with professional fields such as reporting and the arts.

YouTube has been used in projects around engaging children and adolescents in healthy eating[i], but its power as a teaching tool may be underutilized. Although using it for Universal Design for Learning may take some creativity considering the need for active and even public contribution to most parts of the broadcasting process, its power lies in its popularity and familiarity among students, its ability to provoke competition, and its capacity for students to make it emotionally relevant. Popular videos on YouTube have emotional draws to them, so creating lessons around researching, analyzing, and judging the successful elements- such as emotional draw, length, production value, etc – would be engaging, and further, could be used for the first part of low to high sequencing of a SAFE lesson¹.

[1] Adapted from: Crawford, Glenda. Differentiation for the Adolescent Learner : Accommodating Brain Development, Language, Literacy, and Special Needs. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin PressPrint.

S	“Set up” the content knowledge base. These questions focus on basic comprehension and factual responses.
A	Pose questions that are more “analytic” in nature and require students to interpret knowledge through contextual clues.
F	“Focus” thinking in a new direction.
E	Stimulate “evaluative” thinking which persuades students to appraise, assign value, and reflect.

Once students are set-up with research guidelines for YouTube searches and analyze the effective elements, teachers could move onto focusing the students on creating a video of their own and have students evaluate it based on the number of previously identified elements they incorporate and on the number of hits their video gets (which they can establish based on similar video and which provides a challenge).

This same type of lesson can be used to train students to recognize the reasons behind the publishing of videos on YouTube and to criticize and evaluate their validity, legitimacy, and potential for impact. This critical understanding would arm them against the persuasive content that may be targeting them that does not consider their wellbeing, which expands well beyond food. I work with a non-profit organization called FoodFight (foodfight.org) that does work similar to this lesson and is seeing staggering changes in teachers’ and high school students’ attitudes towards food across New York City. FoodFight offers workshops, curriculum materials, and support to guide teachers and their students to a completely different way of thinking about food and how food impacts our lives. Teachers and students become, in a sense, food detectives. This cultivation of detective-like critical lenses and voices is essential to life skills. And so if YouTube can help us with that cultivation, then let us use it to teach towards heartier educational harvests. Too far with the metaphor? Sorry. I get pretty excited about food.

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[i] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in7THnJvHac

Media and Technology Critique

Who would have imagined that social networking websites would greatly boost the evolution of human social interaction in the 21^st century? Among them, Facebook, enjoying a global user population of 600 million, stands out distinctively. Since it has become an inseparable part of many adolescents’ daily life, teachers should build the link between the technologies so often used by today’s youth to enhance their educational development. Although challenges may hinder its successful practice in education, this continuously developing modality of technology is what interests me most.

With Facebook, users from anywhere around the world can, not only chat with someone by a simple click, but also have quick access to their friends’ latest news. Once logged into Facebook, users can clearly see what their friends are doing, how they felt recently, what they like or dislike. In summary, this social media platform establishes the most encompassing tool for its users to speak out their voices with their real identities. Collaborated with the third party, Facebook also enables people to update their latest news via other channels, especially through the third party applications installed on smart phones. Besides its convenience for communication, it also plays the role of conveying multi-dimensional information, including movies, music, pictures, articles, and so on. Moreover, it creates a unique opportunity for people to organize activities and make them public. In general, the invention of Facebook has dramatically facilitated social interactions.

Although it contributes to building friendships and spreading information, it is not without its problems. Users, especially young people, spend considerable amounts of time on each of their visits to its website, either via mobile or non-mobile devices. They constantly visit their friends’ homepages, and add comments to people’s status and passages. Some of them even rely on Facebook or have developed some addiction to it. Additionally, adolescent users are easily exposed to age-inappropriate information, including violence, racism, and pornographic messages.

In this scenario, with social media becoming an intricate part of adolescents’ lives, how should teachers use this double-edged sword wisely in their instructions? Since Facebook is a perfect stage for students to share their ideas with each other, teachers can establish a homepage for the class in order to help forge positive relationships amongst students and teachers. In traditional classroom settings, many teachers find it challenging to get along with their students well. While on Facebook, teachers and students get to know each other better in a more casual way. As a result, students are more willing to consult their teachers, and teachers know students’ academic needs more clearly. As we all know, the harmonious and interactive atmosphere will serve as the base of the successful teaching in the future.

Besides boosting mutual understanding, Facebook is a useful tool for foreign language teachers like me to give students language trainings. As a Mandarin teacher, I think that a natural language environment can be created on Facebook. Since people use Facebook for communication, communicative goals in a language class can be partly achieved through Facebook. By setting up weekly discussions and establishing certain rules for assessing students’ comprehension and language proficiency, students are required to respond to their teachers’ status or articles in Chinese. Since students are technology savvy and accustomed to visiting the site, they are more willing to complete their assignments and practice typing Chinese characters in this way. Meanwhile, teachers can also moderate and control the access to the homepage, and maintain focus on the topics under discussion.

In addition, they can also post assignments, useful links, and samples of work on Facebook regularly. Music, videos, and pictures related to the target subject or the current lesson can motivate students’ interest. For my language class, I will post songs (Chinese lyrics), movies (Chinese transcripts, culture), pictures (word flashcards, culture) on Facebook in order to create a multi-sensory language-learning environment for students. Various language exposures through different media can stimulate students to acquire knowledge more quickly.  Moreover, teachers can organize certain academic or social and subject-related events on Facebook. For example, teachers can arrange a visit to the Museum of Chinese in America, and let them know the history of China and early Chinese immigrants’ life in the U.S. As a language teacher, I believe this gives students an access to various learning experiences and language producing.

Although Facebook does have a potentially negative side, such as overuse and distraction, these could be overcome through appropriate management and regulations. As for teenagers who tend to lack self-control and be more immature, teachers and school counselors can work together in aiding students to moderate their use of the Internet. Peer supervision may also be a good alternative in this case.

Generally, teachers and students can both benefit from the powerful functions that Facebook possesses on a daily basis if this social networking website is adopted wisely. Although Facebook appears as relatively new tool in the modern education, what teachers should bear in mind is that they always use such a tool to lead students on the way of becoming responsible and self-motivated learners ultimately.

Facebook Community

Facebook Community

            Facebook offers students a sense of community in an era in which students are increasingly being drawn into the cyber world. Facebook allows students to create a profile that is individual to them, and allows them to interact with friends and family while also staying plugged in. Facebook users utilize this website for various purposes including: interacting with each other both publically and privately through Facebook walls and chat, respectively; sharing pictures/videos, links, information, interests, current locations, music, ideas, items for sale, and etc; managing planning of events; and group communication. Facebook allows students to interact with each other in a manner that the classroom alone does not allow. Friendships and relationships are strengthened in a way through this online community. Also, unlike other social networking media, Facebook connects users through networks and displays mutual friends, which encourages students to interact with people they may know – not strangers.

            Students know all about fostering their own community in the cyber world through Facebook – far beyond what older generations know about using various Facebook features to contribute to the community. If teachers master Facebook, it can be used in multiple ways in the classroom. Teachers can use Facebook as a means to communicate with their students – whether this means posting homework and important information on Facebook or collecting assignments. Students can also use Facebook to interact with each other for group projects and other tasks. A danger of Facebook can be online bullying or the fact that students use the Internet as a source to publicize their feelings, which can be solved if teachers (and parents) are on Facebook themselves monitoring student activity from the inside.

            In history classes specifically, students can create Facebook profiles as a means to empathize with historical figures. For example, students can be assigned historical figures for whom they will create Facebook profiles demonstrating their knowledge about the assigned figure and interact with other historical figures in the classroom by posting on each others’ walls, creating events for actual historic events, and other outlets that Facebook provides. Through this anachronistic community, students can learn history in a way they can relate – seeing “James Madison is attending the Constitutional Convention” on one’s timeline may be an effective way to remember historic events and occurrences. As technology is always changing, newer ways to incorporate history can be found. New features like the timeline can be used as an interactive way to map out history. Teaching using the technology that is familiar to students allows for more engagement with the material, and allows students to create a community of historical figures that interact with each other. Using Facebook in this manner ties together present day technology with past history and ideas allowing students to empathize with generations past.

            Tying together history and Internet safety, this lesson can incorporate the lesson that what happens on the Internet, like decisions made in history, is permanent. One wrong photo upload or one wrong decision by a historical figure can have reverberating effects on the future. This is an idea important to all history, and knowing this can teach students to think twice about their actions on the Internet. The patterns seen in history are being continued on the Internet through the Facebook community, making it a vital website for teachers to monitor and use.