For my teaching externship at Virginia Union University (VUU, Spring 2013), I decided to experiment with using Facebook as a webspace dedicated to digital material related to our Microbiology class. From a survey that I gave to my students early in the semester, I learned that the majority of my students used Facebook to some degree. I created the page as an optional activity for the students, and it was completely voluntary for them to visit and use. While it was not wildy successful in terms of the number of students who “liked” my page, the few who did use it seemed to enjoy the space. One student in particular completely ran with the photo albums, uploading images that he took of each laboratory that we completed. He also uploaded a video of himself, where he described the results that he obtained from a particular experiment that we did. His excitement for capturing our labs in photos inspired myself and my co-teaching partner to do the same. In the end, we have a nice collage of our time spent this semester in the Microbiology laboratory on the Facebook page.
On the “wall” portion of the Facebook page, I posted reminders about upcoming deadlines and exams, and posted links to currents articles in the news related to our class topics. I also shared links to YouTube videos that showed laboratory techniques or demonstrated a principle of microbiology that we discussed. At one point, I had a student share a YouTube video that they found on their own, which made me excited to know that they were at least thinking about Micro outside of the class. Admittedly, I did not devote as much time as I could have to the page, and that was mostly because the page only served a subset of the students in my class. However, I made a weekly attempt to keep new material posted, and uploaded the pictures taken from the recent labs. In the future, I will certainly consider using Facebook again in the classroom, perhaps when more students are interested and I have more of an opportunity to use it as a fixture of the classroom.
*Below are photos and links that were excerpted from the class Facebook page, to give you a sense of its content.
-Andrea R. Beyer, Ph.D.
-Andrea R. Beyer, Ph.D.
Evolution of Academia 