Facebook for Education!

- May 16, 2021

Facebook is a social networking tool where people connect, share ideas, pictures, news and you can also create groups, join groups and events, follow pages of your interests. On its company website, it is stated that its mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

Can we use Facebook for education?

Haven't you already started using Facebook in the classroom yet? We can use this social media tool in many different ways. Educators can share and follow discipline pages, news and thoughts. there is even an official page for education on Facebook, https://education.fb.com/ . This is a professional learning community for educators where they come together to share, learn, collaborate and innovate. They help each other with any teaching and learning problems they experience.

There have even been some studies done on using Facebook as an educational tool and one of is done by Carolyn M. Shaw from Wichita State University. You can click here to access the article. There are some interesting findings in this article. She mentioned four potential benefits of using this tool. They are in her words:

'creating a sense of community and promoting collaboration
enhancing communication between instructors and students,
developing computer literacy and language skills,
incorporating current student culture into the learning environment is explored.

Although Facebook is a very effective tool for educators, Carolyn also mentioned some challenges and limitation in her article such as:

professionalism as the students may not be able to follow the student-teacher communication
privacy, it can expose both students' and teachers' personal lives online and neither of them really want to be exposed. There are some privacy settings available on the tool for these issues now.
distraction, some educators believe that it can also be a distraction for students, they can spend most of their time on Facebook which could eventually harm their academic performance.

Despite the disadvantages of this tool, there have been a lot of examples of effective usage for educational purposes.

Here is a video in which students and teachers from Uk share their ideas on using social media and Facebook:

You can even teach in facebook groups. There is a Learning Units feature where you can create units, add videos, set the date, organize your lessons. Let's see a short tutorial on how to use this feature on facebook: