Can We Use Facebook as a Teaching and Learning Tool?
Can We Use Facebook as a Teaching and Learning Tool?

Summary/Abstract: In the last three years, Facebook has become one of the buzzword in the social media area, no matter of the location, age, income or occupation. With more than 500 million active and registered users, Facebook could be considered the fourth largest country in the world. Thus, taking into account the above issues, not surprising, Facebook has become a popular social networking site among young people worldwide, including university students. Over time, more and more applications and functionalities included increased value of this social networking. In the educational area, Facebook has a great potential, both for teaching and for learning. Two years ago, when I used for the first time Facebook as a learning management system for teaching activities, Facebook wasn’t the preferred social networks of Romanian students. But even so, we had created a closed group and we had used it from time to time for putting announcements, sharing resources, organizing weekly tutorials and conducting online discussions. On the other part, we have been used Facebook even for other educational related applications, purposes and activities. Thus, Facebook was also used for archiving of educational artifacts, for tracing the learning development, for informal learning activities and for assessment purposes. More than that, this group has remained active even nowadays and thus, I could see how students work even after their period of study related to this discipline (according with their academic plan schedule) has ended. Therefore, this paper shows that the Facebook group could be effectively used as a learning management system and as a tool to develop and enhance the 21st century skills of students. Therefore, this paper aims to bring into light the possible integration of the social networking site Facebook into university life.

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