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This is a follow-up to my previous post on our trials using Facebook in school. If you missed that you can read it here.
Yesterday we finished our first set of trials around using the site for education so I wanted to briefly summarise what we found here. One group of our Spanish students had been testing the idea of using a duplicate profile- we felt one of the lowest risk possibilities for allowing staff and students to interact on the network.
The success I’ve seen is that students seemed keen to trial things with us, and it was very easy to set ourselves up to allow students to access the site in school if we wanted to. Switching the site over into Spanish and asking students to create and interact in the language on the website worked well too- their familiarity with how Facebook works helped a lot with some of the more unfamiliar terms.
However as expected we’ve found that this approach isn’t ideal. From a student point of view asking them to log in using a different account to their personal one meant they wouldn’t be as likely to use it outside of the classroom sessions specifically designed for it. We also found we have a small minority of students whose parents do not allow them to use Facebook at all.
The most major issue with this idea though lies in the Facebook terms and conditions. Point 4.2 on their terms document bans users from maintaining more than one profile, so this counts the idea out completely. We finished the trial off for the sake of completeness, but have now asked students to remove the duplicate profiles.
We are going to continue to work at different ideas for the network in the new school year as I still think there is value in it. The point of these trials was to come up with some evidence to back up what we think could work. Our next attempt will come in September- creating either a group or a page for an MFL class to interact, but with all users using their own profiles. Will post on that later in the year.
Image source- Facebook, CC licensed by Laikolosse on Flickr
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