Monthly Archives: October 2015

Facebook: the educational network

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.

Instagram: Engage with Content in a New Way

In my personal life, I am guilty of using Instagram frequently. I enjoy spending time looking at other people’s pictures and sharing my own experiences through this particular form of media because I think it showcases my personal thoughts and style. While most people do not think of Instagram as an educational tool, I believe otherwise. Upon further inspection, Instagram has unique characteristics that could be useful in teaching certain types of content matter, and I believe that students would be excited and motivated to learn using Instagram. Continue reading Instagram: Engage with Content in a New Way

Facebook as learning tool

Media plays an important role in adolescents’ daily life and study. Social medias like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, are some media tools online with which youngsters cannot live without. According to a research conducted by Piper Jaffray, by spring 2014, 72 percent of teens use Facebook (The Washington Post). It also states that the population of Facebook is almost the same as the population in China. What can adolescents get from this social network?

First of all, Facebook creates a place for adolescents for belonging to somewhere. According to Robert Fried, adolescents are desperately seeking for an acceptance of a certain group. Using Facebook and having an online identity is also a way of being accepted by a certain group and acquire their identity (The Game of School). In this sense, Facebook is quite similar to online video games in the sense of unreal community. Jordan Shapiro has made a very interesting point in his article talking about video games. He mentioned that in a video games there are two “I”s, one as the controller outside the screen, one as the character or avatar in the game. With this distance, students are building their metacognitive knowledge. More important, it is helpful for adolescents for learn to take others’ perspectives. I think it is the same thing with the identity that adolescents create in Facebook.

Moreover, it will be helpful that the teacher could regard Facebook as an educational tool and include that into students’ learning. Stimulating students learning responsibility and interests by using the Facebook and add that to their online identity will be helpful for students to find their real identity as learners.

It is significant to know that there are all kinds of information on Facebook that adolescents have access to. The positive aspect is learners from all over the world can get in touch with each other and exchange their opinions. It’ll be beneficial that the teacher encourages students to search for different ideas on the same topic, so widen and deepen their understanding and also grow an open mind to different opinions.

Adolescents are in the stage where they can hardly tell between right and wrong. It is the reason why they are easily affected by whatever information in the outside world. Under a large and frequent exposure to meaningless, or even unhealthy information will ambiguous students’ social recognition, in other words, their personal value will be shaken by what they have acquired through their “friends” in Facebook. Moreover, some adolescents tend to create a “perfect me” on the internet, which is different from what they are in reality. In this sense, some may be lost in the “perfect me” on the internet, and once they notice what they are in reality is not as good as they are in the online world, they may lose themselves in reality and choose to hide behind the network. Moreover, adolescents lack self-control, they may get addicted to Facebook and are getting consistently check their website to see if they have new messages or if someone else has posted something new. They will tend to waste all the time on them. So it is essential for teacher and parents to strictly manage the time that students could have access to them on a daily or weekly basis, and really encourage them to use it as an educational tool instead of a meaningless self-expansion platform.

Reference

Jordan Shapiro, Mar 30, 2015. How Video Games In The Classroom Will Make Students Smarter, Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanshapiro/2015/03/30/how-video-games-in-the-classroom-will-make-students-smarter/.

Nico Lang, Feb 21, 2015. Why teens are leaving Facebook: It’s meaningless, The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02/21/why-teens-are-leaving-facebook-its-meaningless/

Robert Freid, The game of School, San Francisco, CA : Jossey-Bass;c2005. p.107-115.

 

The TPACK framework.

Before my student life in NYU, I never used technology in my entire life. In my last semester, we learned different features of technology in teaching and learning process especially in my content area. I believe that the technology is affecting the lives of peoples in both positive and negative manners. Because of technology, the world has become smaller and it is the largest factor of globalization. Technology is fast becoming the driving force of adolescent and high impact on their over all development. Nowadays people of all ages have become quite comfortable with technology.
Here my concern is Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK), Continue reading The TPACK framework.

Facebook’s World Domination

Media and Technology Critique: Facebook’s World Domination

The dawn of the 21st century marks the shift into an era where technology dominates our daily lives. Two year olds who can barely speak in complete sentences can easily open up an iPad and navigate through the multitude of icons and tabs to play their games or start a storytelling app. The center of many classrooms today is no longer dominated by chalkboards but rather smartboards. Education is now, more than ever before, intimately intertwined with media and technology.

One media platform – amongst many – that emerged from the technology era is Facebook. A social media giant, Facebook changed the way in which people stay connected and share information. We are no longer dependent on phone calls and outings to catch up. Instead, Facebook made it very simple for all your friends – or at least, the ones that use Facebook – to know what you ate for lunch this very instant if you so choose to post onto your Facebook timeline. Furthermore, Facebook plays a role in changing the educational landscape amongst adolescents as well. Before the arrival of Facebook and other social media giants, students are more likely to physically meet up to study for tests and do homework with only their classmates and friends from the same class, and seek out their teachers after school or during lunch for additional assistance. Back in the days of snail mail and Windows 97, there was more physical interpersonal communication however information definitely took a lot longer to be transmitted amongst a group of students from different classes and periods. With the arrival of Facebook and the technology boom, students can easily form private Facebook groups and upload study notes for specific classes, be it AP U.S. History or English Literature, and share it amongst the fifty or a hundred kids that takes the same class with same teacher but in different periods. When students have trouble answering a question for homework that is due the next day, they can easily, with a few taps on the keyboard and a simple click of the mouse, send a request for help to the Facebook group. Most importantly, from the perspective of the adolescents, they know that they would get help and most likely an answer very quickly. Facebook in a sense provides a safe, positive, and convenient platform for students, especially those who are more introverted or do not do as well in academia, to give and ask for aid without feeling embarrassed or shy.

From an educator’s perspective, Facebook too can be a valuable learning tool. Just as students can form private groups to share notes and discuss about homework, educators can use this function to encourage students to engage in an informal discussion about certain topics with the aid of prompts. If you are a history teacher and the class is about to study the Great Depression, you can post prompts such as “what do you think are some of the main causes for the Great Depression?” to push the students to begin thinking about the topic and to actively participate in the class.