Interacting with students through FB

FB is a new thing to myself, mind you but I really started 'actively FBing' for just a little bit more than one year. I never thought of FBing with my students, due to the privacy issues and well, students sometimes post things on FB that as a teacher you'd rather not see it.

This idea of FBing with students was actually suggested by the students of my class, they created an FB group for the class and invited me to join. I didn't want to reveal my 'real' FB account to them, so I registered a new one. The students also know that, but they didn't mind.

Since I am also teaching them science, I decided to occasionally upload some interesting pictures, videos and links to useful websites that may help them learn. The students welcomed what I did and I am also glad to see from their comments that the links added motivation to their learning.

Therefore starting from last month, I decided to make FB groups for the other subjects that I teach, compared to groups for class, less activities happen in pure groups for subjects. Students seem to prefer asking me questions through private messages instead of posting their questions in the group, if a question that is worth discussing came by, I will put the question into the group and invite for some discussion, however this usually doen't work very well and I eventually had to answer the question myself.

I think the FB idea changed my role as a teacher in the way that I became more accessible to the students, it also granted me a very convenient way to share resources with my students, which used to be quite tedious and even paper-costly before we had FB. Students are also more willing to ask questions because doing so in FB seems to be less threatening to them, compared to that you have to wait for the teacher outside the staff room.

In order to be able to utilize FB in a better way, I am thinking of using it as a formative assessment tool to several of my classes, I think the idea works somehow similar to what we are doing now in this MITE course, which is to ask students to post something related to their learning on FB regularly. Some self-assessment and peer-assessment tools can also be posted on FB so that the students can try making use of them out of the classroom setting.