The Aaron Sorkin production, The Social Network, chronicles the early life of the most ubiquitous of all social media platforms: Facebook.   The movie depicts the instant popularity, almost virus like in its spread, of this new technology and the rise of its famous founders.  While a dramatic picture, the film accurately portrays Facebook’s role in young peoples’ live and how it has become an integral component of a prosperous social life.

Recent scholarly research in the field of education emphasizes the importance of social interaction in the learning process.   This includes interactions with both teachers and classmates: positive peer-to-peer and teacher-peer relationships are critical to student success.  These relationships motivate students, reduce affective stress levels in the classroom and allow teachers to understand the individual needs of students.  While most educators are aware of the importance of social relationships, creating and maintaining them can be challenging in any classroom, even more so in classes where there are upwards of thirty students who come from diverse backgrounds.

Facebook can be an effective tool to fill in the interaction gaps and create a more involved classroom, one that is in tune with the interests of students.  As an educator, Facebook can be used for classroom organization, fostering student discussion, and addressing student concerns that were not taken care of during class time.   Due to students comfort with the technology, it may be easier to implement than other online classroom management tools or discussion forums.  Additionally, the ease of access promotes student participation and autonomy as a learner; the phrase “I couldn’t do my homework because…” will become harder to justify as school work becomes accessible by phone, computer and tablet.

While Facebook is a key resource that can be implemented by educators to engage students across disciplines it has particular relevance for the second language classroom.  One of the biggest challenges as a language teacher is creating authentic situations for language use and relating language learning to student’s everyday lives.  The use of Facebook brings the target language to a platform that students already engage with.   Students can communicate with each other in the foreign language, particularly supportive for more introverted students who are often quiet in the classroom.  Students can connect through Facebook to language learning resources, target language news sources, and famous figures who post in the target language.  As student’s news feeds’ fill with the foreign language, their brains will too, with authentic input, vocabulary that reflects their interests and culturally relevant content.  The hope is that students can see the living nature of language firsthand through their online experience and be able to create their own persona in the target language.

Facebook can be a highly effective resource for teaching critical media literacy, if teachers are willing to do the front loading necessary for students to be able to engage with a critical eye.  Teaching about credible news sources, exploring stereotypes of those that speak the target language and monitoring student discussions are all ways that teachers can use Facebook to create discerning students who can censoriously analyze online content.

The use of any social media platform does however come with risks and challenges; the foremost challenge being the protection of student identity and information.  As an educator, one must be knowledgeable on how to use the technology in a way that does not put student safety or privacy at risk.  The other obstacle to the implementation of a Facebook friendly classroom is access to an internet equipped device when working with students with high financial need.  In these cases, the use of social media, though challenging, is of increased importance to cultivate leaners that are savvy to resources available and mindful of their pitfalls.

Over time, successful implementation of Facebook as a classroom tool can improve student engagement, the social network will become the educational network, but then, there is no need to tell the students that.