Improving knowledge: 2010

Facebook in Education

Facebook has been used to meet new people around the world or to find friends who you have not seen plenty of time ago; however, there are others uses of facebook which can help you to remind a special day or a birthday of your friends and there are other applications about posting pictures and add comments, and so on but, all those applications are only use to socializ

e and to have fun; so, what about educational applications on facebook?

Educational applications could be created on facebook but no everybody wants to use this social network to continue taking classes at home or at school in free times because it is not a part of the class, It is more an entertainment or enjoyable resource than strict academic one. That’s way this article has been written in order to create awareness about facebook as an academic resource without boring interactions.

This link is an article about facebook with educational uses and there you can see some authors´ opinions about social networks like facebook. http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=98854

What is facebook?

According to Wikipedia,

Facebook is a social network service and website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of July 2010^[update] Facebook has more than 500 million active users, Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the colloquiall name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.

That means that facebook is a social network which is used to have an account and then create a personal profile where you can post pictures, keep friendships, send messages, enjoy plenty of applications, and other kind of enjoyments, etc. But, reread the last part of the paragraph from Wikipedia and find something interesting about why facebook was created firstly…. Did you get it?... Let me quote this part what I am talking about, and analyze it: the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. So, was facebook created as an academic tool or only a social network?

Facebook has been created to keep college students connected and the options given by this web page were pointed to share information among students in order to know each other as well as they could. This is absolutely interesting because we did not know this academic purpose of facebook and we only have used it as a social network. Facebook can be used as an academic tool as a entertainment web page we only have to know how we can create educational groups and forums , and also we can share pictures, information, tasks, and so on.

This video show us how we can create an educational group on facebook,and what can we do with it. Let´s check out.

Great! now, we can create a course group on facebook in order to work in the classroom. This is another video which talks about facebook in the classroom... Do you imagine our students using facebook as an academic resource into the classroom? What about our students'parents' opinions?

So, is facebook a problem or a solution? speak your mind... I think that it is a good idea to help to students to be exposure of real social context, however the parental control is necessary at home.

Gabriel Indriago

Pixton is a comic-making software which is a very useful tool if you want to Discover, share, and create comics for contests, discussion forums, etc. This software can be used for fun, educational and business purposes. If you want to make use of it for an educational idea, it is a visual writing tool for all subjects where you can personalize in a private environment; also, it’s aligned with curriculum standards. Moreover, It can be use for business too because it is a Comic storyboarding tool which is perfect for marketing & training. What about its price? This tool can be used for free for a month; and its price before the month of practicing it’s of $2.95.

Comics can help early readers with language by providing visual clues to the context of the narrative. For more advanced readers, comics can contain all the complexity of 'normal' written material which the student must comprehend, such as: alliteration, puns, metaphors, symbolism, context, inference, point of view and narrative structures. In addition, comics also have the ability to meet the needs of students in a variety of learning styles, making reference to many of Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences.

I did this Jigsaw: