Guest post on official Facebook in Education blog

I was invited several months ago to create a guest post on the official “Facebook in Education” blog. My post went up today and can be found here (full link below). I’m happy to see that Facebook has vision and dedicated staff towards seeing this massive platform put to use in education.

As a Learning Management System the Facebook group enabled important educational exchanges, but there are a few additional features that could make this platform even more useful. The ability to see all contributions made to the group by a single person would enable a teacher to view all comments, links, pictures, videos and even “Like” buttons used by a student within the group page.  This would enable an instructor to easily track and measure student engagement. Adding the ability to make separate photo albums would enable an instructor to differentiate contributions posted from different classes. If Facebook groups also had the ability to add applications, a teacher could feed information from other sources, via RSS or SMS, directly into the group page. Finally, if Facebook had the ability to host document and slideshows, there would be no reason to use Google Documents or another document hosting service – students could read documents or view lecture slides without leaving the group page.

http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-in-education/using-a-facebook-group-as-a-learning-management-system/10150244221815570