Engage Students with Facebook

Go where they are: Facebook

A long time ago I was able to engage my students via newsgroups (nntp) or the forums in Moodle or Blackboard. Lately getting students to post on the forums in my LMS has become a chore.

So I decided to try something different last semester and “go where they are”: Facebook.

This worked amazing well. Engagement of my students in discussions outside the classroom exploded.

But I don’t want to “Friend” my Students

Don’t worry, a group in Facebook is separate from your “friends” list. Your students will not be your Facebook friends unless you choose to do that separately. Each group is separate and not part of your regular group of friends.

So feel free to try this out with your classes and see if this increases engagement with your students. It worked for mine.

What about Twitter?

You may choose to use Twitter, Google+ or some other option. You can even use a combination (I am). Ask yourself if you are engaging your students outside the classroom walls and how you can improve that engagement.

Show me the Data!

I’m working on pulling the data together and preparing some formal analysis of my results with this experiment. This is not ready yet and in fact I am trying to figure out how to get the activity data out of Facebook so I can analyze it. Any pointers to how to do that (for Facebook Groups) would be much appreciated. I think I really should contact Facebook for help directly as well.

Your turn

What are you doing to Engage your Students? Let me know.