Facebook - a friend or a foe?

This talk focused on some of the applications of Facebook in teaching.

At first Evelina Miscin gave us some social networking vocabulary to discuss in pairs and to decide what they are for and what they do. We had a lot of fun doing this task. Some of the abbreviations were hard to understand. Social swarming and social networking fatigue are easy to understand. But how about MoSoSo and SoLoMo? Can you guess what they stand for? We had a hard time trying to work out what they were and failed. :(

 Having discussed the advantages and disadvantages of Facebook, we came to the conclusion that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and that it is OK to use Facebook to involve students outside the classroom as long as the activities we introduce meet the learners needs.

I personally use Facebook to share various activities and news with my students and I think that Facebook is more of a friend than a foe. As long as we create a separate group for our students to make them feel comfortable so that they communicate with each other without anybody else seeing their posts, I think Facebook helps.

Full session can be viewed here: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2012/sessions/2012-03-20/facebook-friend-or-foe

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