Social media and the classroom?

Abstract

Many years ago, I learned (through eavesdropping on a conversation during lab) that my students had set up their own Facebook group. They told me they were using it to help each other with homework assignments. This year, my daughter took physics at a university. She and her friends were struggling a bit with the online quizzes. I suggested that she set up a Facebook community and add me as a member. I would answer questions and help the group study. My daughter's group used Facebook to get answers to specific questions from the quizzes. They often ended up helping each other because the questions were posed quite late in the evening. Questions ranged from exact copies of the original queries to “Does anyone know what equation to use for this?” I began to think that, although their grades were improving on the quizzes, they were not gaining any content knowledge. To combat this, I made and posted a few short video clips reteaching the content.