Facebook in the Classroom

I mentioned this in my graded assignment as well. I taught an early morning scripture study class for highschoolers. We met at 6am before they went to school. I used facebook to communicate with my students in several ways.

First, a parent helped me by setting up a groups and invited all the students to it. Originally I was going to just make an email group, but I realized that fewer and fewer teenagers are using email these days. I feel so old. Anyway, the majority of the students were in the group. Since it was a church class I couldn't really require participation. Every week I sent a message to everyone to outline what we would be reading and studying during the week. If we were having special guests, I made note of it. I would also send out announcements if they needed to be aware of any changes. It was also really helpful in communicating to the parents. Many of them were also in the group. Some of the parents who didn't allow their children to have facebook accounts joined the group and would pass on the information to them.

In doing this, many of my students became my facebook "friends." They didn't have to in order to join the group though. Being "friends" with my students helped me in many ways. Since it was a church class, it was really helpful for me to be aware of their activities, thoughts, and challenges. I could send uplifting messages, happy birthday notes, and see what sort of things were going on in their lives. It created a sort of kinship that I might not have been able to create with only 45 minutes a day. For instance, two of my students just won a national high school film-making competition. School is out, so I might not have heard about it, but I saw it on facebook and was able to hoop and holler in celebration electronically, communicating to them long-distance how proud I was of them. It really was a wonderful tool to stay in touch, and communicate important messages for the class. I rarely used facebook for anything else, but keeping it active just for that class was completely worth it.

In retrospect, I wish that I could have had more discussion in the group's discussion board. I tried to post some things there, but it never really took off. I also wish I had posted more pictures from our class activities and encouraged them to do the same. It would have been great to have them communicate to each other outside of our class.