Face the Social Media: Facebook is a useful tool in the classroom

Facebook (www.facebook.com)

If you have a pulse, you've probably heard of Facebook. As Emily and I walk around the technology-rich environment of the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity (our place of employment), we often find students working on a class project in one monitor window with Facebook opened up on another window.

We also see students walking to their next class with their heads down, looking at their phones, checking status updates, and messaging their Facebook friends.

Facebook has their attention, and we need to use this in the classroom.

Now, I know what you may be thinking. "I'm spending my time trying to keep students off their Facebook accounts when I'm teaching, why would I use that website in my class?"

Here's why: Facebook works great in the classroom. In my experience, students are happy to see the instructor use this website as opposed to BlackBoard--where communication is more tedious.

One reason instructors don't like the idea of using Facebook is that they don't want to "Friend" their students. That's a concern I have as well, but when I teach a class the first thing I do is set up a Facebook group and ask the students to join.

Facebook groups allow people who are not "Friends" to share a virtual space in which they can communicate, share links, videos, and pictures, and actually message each other when questions arise. As the administrator of the group, I can limit the group to members of the class and can restrict posts to only be viewable to the members of the group. In other words, groups allow some level of privacy.

If a student doesn't have a Facebook account, it's easy to create one. And if privacy is an issue, it's easy to create a fun account. For example, I created one for Bebe Giraffe--the Noel Studio mascot.

Here's how it works. I'll post a link on BlackBoard or our class Blog to the Facebook group I created. I usually title the group "ekuclass" or something like that. During class, students will click on the link and then click on a button that submits a request to join the group. I'm notified when someone asks to join, and I can accept or reject the request.

Once everyone is in, we can use the group to post links to things like Prezi Meetings, post questions that we have about assignments, posts videos and pictures that complement what we learn in class, and post class projects for feedback.

As an instructor, I really enjoy seeing students provide peer review on assignments (in the form of "comments"), and I often use the "like" button as a way to generate quick feedback to figure out what student project was the class favorite. I also enjoy posting "polls" to see what the class thinks about a particular concept.

However, my favorite thing about Facebook is that more often than not, when I see that a question has been posted, another student--or several--have already posted answers before I can.

Now that's a dynamic environment.

No (reflection without) Your Meme

QuickMeme (www.quickmeme.com)

After a challenging project, or during the composition of a prolonged communication product, I often ask my students to reflect on their thoughts and concerns about the process of communicating with others. My usual approach is using a freewrite assignment that they can complete during a few minutes of class time.

While these reflections are informative and can help me as I revise my assignments, the writing is very private by nature. It's handwritten on paper and written primarily for me. This semester I attempted something different. Instead of the standard hand-written-words-on-paper reflection, I had them create a meme (pronounced "meem") to explain their feelings about the assignments and/or share their thoughts about the end of the semester.

Emily recommend I use quickmeme.com, and the class really seemed to find the program accessible. As it turned out, no one in my class had created a meme although they had all seen them on their social networking sites. They had 10 minutes to find a picture, add the words to created their meme, and post their memes on our Facebook group.

The result was lots of fun and some compelling class discussion. As memes were posted on Facebook, I would project the image. While some of the memes were more effective than others, the class learned how to create a meme, and I learned what they were going through during these last few weeks of the semester.

Most importantly, the class learned they were not alone. We are all feeling stressed and overwhelmed at the end of the semester. Instructors and technology associates included. Now...I need to get some grading done.

Can you see me now? Visualizing thesis topics on Many Eyes.

Many Eyes (http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/)

This IBM experiment has quite a few fun options for visualizing data, and Emily and I have enjoyed playing with different ways to "see" numbers. Like most of the other sites listed on this blog, Many Eyes is free and cloud based. All you do is upload a excel-style spreadsheet, enter data by hand, or pick a data set that someone else uploaded. While interesting, I haven't used this website in class and haven't blogged about it because I don't do a ton of work with hard data. That changed with the President's State of the Union.

I was speaking with a class of ESL students about graphs and pulled up Many Eyes. We started looking at the variety of visualization possibilities and discussing what visualization would work best for what kind of data set. From scatter point charts to word clouds, the range of possibilities is stunning, but we noticed, pretty quickly, that someone had uploaded the President's speech. The class was interested in seeing what topics were of concern to the President in his speech, so we started to explore.

We opened the already-created word cloud and saw some words were clearly larger, indicating that these were spoken frequently.

Right away we noticed "jobs," "energy," and "tax" as we discussed the cloud in class. Under the cloud we found a link to the actual data file--basically the speech in a text document. Once we were there, we clicked on the visualization link below the speech and were offered a wide range of new charts to visualize the speech. We selected "word tree" and entered the word "jobs" in the search bar. This is what we found:

From this visualization we could easily see in what context the word "jobs" was being used in the speech. It occurred to me then, that this website would be an excellent way to find topics for research. Students could upload a text document, visualize the data, and figure out different approaches to the text.

Whether you use this website in class or not, I would encourage you to have fun and play with this site. If you are working with information by state or country, I would highly encourage you to see what Many Eyes can do to help you visualize and share information with others.

YouTube. You edit. You need to try this.

YouTube Video Editor (http://www.youtube.com/editor)

We've been working with a few different video editing software, and finding one that works for students accustomed to Macs, PCs, and Chrome books has been a challenge. Some students, we find, don't even have access to there own computers, so editing video can be a real challenge. Until recently.

YouTube's video editor is a great, entry-level, cloud-based software that allows students to create simple videos. After creating a free account, students can upload clips of video footage they collected and simply drag them into place on the timeline. They can also drag transitions into place and utilize creative commons video and royalty free music if needed.

Once the footage is in place, an audio file can be selected and typed words can be added to the clips. Right now there is no way to add your own voice-over to the video, so any audio you record on the clips will have to suffice. Once the project is done, just hit publish and it's on YouTube. 

This video shows just how easy this tool is to use.