As I have blogged about many times before, I feel that having learners engaged in the learning process is an extremely important part of the learning process. A happy and motivated learner will generally try and strive to achieve to their full potential. When I stumbled upon Fakebook, I thought that some of my prayers had been answered. Here was a tool that looked and felt like a tool that they were all familiar with and was easy to use. An added bonus was it got through the filters and we were all set to go.
We were reading The Hobbit and the kids were really enjoying it. We are still going (it is a huge book) and we will battle to get it finished by the 9th of December - the end of our school year. My initial plan was to have the kids update their character profile after every period of reading the novel. Some thoughts on this task:
- The kids really enjoyed using the tool and found it quite simple due to its nativity to them.
- When I tried to get multiple kids on the tool at any one time, the server seemed to struggle. I am not sure if that is a problem at my end.
- A lot of kids had trouble with their passwords. They would update their profile and spend a lot of time doing it. When it came time to save it, something would fail and all of the work that they had done was lost.
Overall I must admit to being a little bit underwhelmed. I had grand hopes that this was going to be a very authentic and engaging experience for my kids and in some respects, it was. I really enjoyed seeing how excited that the kids got by undertaking the task but the amount of setbacks dampened their attitude towards it. The tool is free and that is always a bonus. Would I use the tool again.......maybe or I would search for something very similar to it. It is a great way to get the kids reflecting upon what they have read and I could see many cross curricula benefits in using it outside of novel studies.
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