Richard D. Solomon's Blog on Mentoring Jewish Students and Teachers: How Facebook be used to promote learning

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

How Facebook be used to promote learning

When mentoring our pre-service and in-service teachers we need to describe and model both research-based and clinically tested best practices, and demonstrate how these best practices can be applied in the real (i.e. physical) and virtual (i.e. online) classroom for both teaching and teacher training. The combination of face to face instruction in a physical setting and online learning is called blended learning. In this section of the blog we will describe how the internet can serve as a supplemental resource for instruction and the mentoring of pre-service and in-service Jewish educators. In this post we will continue our discussion on how Facebook can facilitate communication among teachers, students, parents, staff and the Jewish community around the globe.

Assumption: The teacher or mentor teacher has a interactive white board (i.e. SMART Board, Promethean, etc.), a Tablet PC (also called a Slate or Blade), a computer presenter or computer with internet access attached to an LCD projector in the classroom. It would be ideal if students or mentees had access to their own laptop computers or Ipads as well.

Note: Although Facebook can be applied in the Judaic Studies blended learning classroom, it can be also be used for training pre-service and in-service Jewish educators for professional or staff development. It is our hope that Jewish educators around the globe will form an online community of practice, a CoP, a group of people who share an interest, a craft, and/or a profession, to enhance the delivery of instruction and training of Jewish educators. For example, here is a CoP you might want to join.

What is Facebook?

According to Widipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook, this is their explanation of Facebook:

Facebook is a social network service and website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of January 2011,Facebook has more than 600 million active users. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.

Where is Facebook located on the web?

Click here and get to the location of Facebook.

Click on the links below and learn about how Facebook can be used to promote learning:

On the next post we will share a chart summarizing the major features of Facebook for Judaic instruction and the mentoring/training of pre-service and in-service Judaic educators.