Dennis Friend, The Daily NonPareil, Staff Writer

The activity in teacher Erin Schoening’s first-grade class at Gunn Elementary School looks like any other first-grade activity. Schoening reads a story to the children about Lilly, a student who got angry and drew an unflattering picture of her teacher. The children answer questions about the narrative.

“Lilly feels bad that she was mean.”

“She apologized.”

“Now, she was kind.”

It’s like any other classroom until 7-year-old Kent Hyde, the teacher’s helper of the day, is asked to use the reading session to provide a status update for the classroom’s Facebook page. He slowly types in “In Language Workshop, we learned characters, problems and solutions.”

Schoening’s class is one of the first in the Council Bluffs Community School District, if not the nation, to use Facebook as a teaching tool, recapping lessons and “synthesizing concepts” while using the social media site to provide updates for their parents and others.

Stevie Barnes, 7, said his class uses Facebook “to let our parents know what we’re doing.”

Do the parents like it?

“Yup.”

Do you like it?

“Yup.”

Kent posted the class update in the page’s status field. Students work with each other under the teacher’s guidance to decide what gets posted.

Schoening and her husband, also a teacher and the district’s K-12 technology coach, helped write the district guidelines for using Facebook in the classroom. Devin Schoening said he and his wife came up with the idea the summer before the 2009-10 school year, and school principals were intrigued with the proposal.

Facebook in the classroom, as used by the Schoenings, offers a way for parents and students to communicate. It also offers students “an authentic writing opportunity, where they can get meaningful feedback from someone other than a teacher,” Devin Schoening said.

In other words, students will not simply state “we had a writing class” on the status update.

“For instance, a class does a writing workshop. We ask the student to create a status update that shows not only what they did but what they learned and why it’s important,” Devin Schoening said.

Erin Schoening said it does not take away from instructional time, and the students in her first grade class love it.

“We update the page two or three times a day,” Erin Schoening said. “I’ll ask the kids what we should say.”

Another advantage of Facebook is familiarity. While there are other social media sites specifically designed for educational purposes, the Facebook advantage is that many parents already are on Facebook and know how to use it.

“Everyone knows someone else on Facebook, so word travels and other teachers got interested,” she said.

There are district guidelines for using Facebook in the classroom.

“You have to be at least 13 to have a Facebook page. The only person who can post to the account is a teacher,” Devin Schoening said. However, Facebook officials contacted the district to say they “love” the way the district is using Facebook.

A password guards against unauthorized Facebook use and the teacher has the password. Appropriate Facebook privacy settings also must be used.

“We can control everything going onto the page,” and attempts to post something inappropriate can be screened out, he said.

“It is 100 percent private. You have to be accepted as a friend of the page and to be accepted you have to have a connection,” Devin Schoening said. That could include parents, siblings, teachers, principals, administrators or someone else with a legitimate reason to connect with a bunch of children.

In addition, “We have a note on our Facebook page to explain who our ‘Friends’ are,” Erin Schoening said.

Six-year-old Ella King, one of Erin Schoening’s first-graders, said “I like Facebook because we send things to our parents and tell them what we do and they send notes back saying they like it.”

That’s another value-added element to the use of Facebook, Devin Schoening said.

“They write for an audience,” he said. “They’ll get comments from students, parents and other classes. They get classroom dialogues.”

The visitors to Erin Schoening’s classroom Facebook page now include educators interested in the project, some from as far away as New York and Bangkok.

“We’re using Facebook in a way it normally has not been used in education. We use it as a learning tool,” Devin Schoening said.

The Schoenings have spoken nationally on their Facebook project, and have fielded questions from around the nation from teachers curious about how best to use the site in the classroom. She said some parents initially were “cautious, a little worried” about the use of Facebook. However, many who started out skeptical have become fans of the page. Parents who originally asked that their children not be photographed or videotaped now ask that their young ones be included.

“The parents love it,” Devin Schoening said. “Many already know how to use Facebook and now their kids can’t say ‘I don’t remember what we did in school today.’ Parents can use it to start conversations with their children. Teachers can post pictures or videos. Erin used it to connect with a student’s family that had not been able to meet face-to-face with her.”

dennis.friend@nonpareilonline.com

http://www.southwestiowanews.com/articles/2010/11/07/council_bluffs/doc4cd61de0eceb2779388716.txt