Sunday, January 3, 2010

Facebook Recap Apps That Inspire Fun and Personalized Learning in the New Year

Facebook is at it again with two more great apps that got my innovative educational juices flowing. One is the "Facebook Status Collage" which takes the Facebook Status Cloud to a new level with highlighted status updates from across the year put into a stylish collage of your choosing.

The other is “My Year in Photos” which allows you to recap a year’s worth of pictures into a style of your choosing (i.e. modern/old fashioned) and you can even change/replace any pictures you’d like.

Take a look at how these recap apps can provide engaging, personalized opportunities for learning.

FUN IDEAS FOR USING A FACEBOOK RECAP APPS

Personal Narrative
-Have students write a memoir based on their status collages or pictures. They may pick one update/picture or build upon a theme.
-Have students create a year in review video highlighting their status collage updates or their year in photos.
-Have students create one, or a number of, personal narrative audio cast or Voki based on their status collage updates.

Team building ideas to help students learn and connect.
-Have students print out their recap app and let students identify which belongs to which student. With the photo app, you may want to count how many other schoolmates are in each student's collage.
-Have students tag their recap app in Flickr using a teacher created account and in the comment box either place a recap app narrative or use the comment box to guess who the app belongs to.
-Have student compare and contrast their recap app. They could write a narrative explaining what they have in common and might never have in common with another class member.
-Have students place their app as a note on FB and tag 20 of their friends asking them to share their thoughts perhaps with an interesting question i.e. what surprised you, stood out, or could you relate to.

Arts and Crafts
-Print the recap apps onto iron on paper and make tee shirts with students word clouds on the back. This could even be used as a fundraiser.
-Use the recap apps to decorate a "Year in Review" in photos and words...bulletin board.

The Facebook recap apps are a great tool for students to get to know each other and provides a vehicle for students to reflect upon what messages they are sharing with their friends over the past year. You may want to ask students to create a status collage of what they might want their message to be in the new year or ask them what their photos may represent. It also provides a fantastic way for students to get ideas for further sharing and publishing about the topic they are most expert in...themselves.

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