The Facebook Plenary

We all know how much students love spending time on social networking sites so here’s a Facebook inspired plenary activity that can be used in any subject.

At the end of the lesson, I will sometimes ask my students to write me a Facebook style status update that relates to what they have learnt.  I have a set template for it but a blank piece of paper will do just as well.  They then hand this in to me on the way out, an idea that stems from Dylan & Black’s idea of an ‘exit pass’ as a result of their ‘Inside the Black Box’ paper.

The range/quality of responses tends to vary between students.  For example Jennie Jones might say “Jennie Jones has learned about Venn Diagrams” whilst Sam Smith might write “Sam Smith has learned that striations are the result of glacial abrasion by moving glaciers on the bedrock in a glacial valley”.  It would of course be unlikely that you’d get this responses in the same lesson, but I’m just trying to demonstrate it can work in a variety of subjects!

But this range of responses doesn’t matter - in fact therein lies the strength of the activity.  Because what do we do to people’s Facebook statuses?  We comment on them of course.  It usually takes me about 5 to 10 minutes to review the whole class’ responses and write an individual comment for each student based upon their comment.  For Jennie Jones I might write “so tell me what exactly a Venn diagram is Jennie”.  For Sam Smith I might write “so where is there a notable example of striations in a glacial valley?” or “what exactly is it in the moving glacier that causes the erosion?”.

You then have a ready made starter activity for the next lesson, by asking the class to respond to the comments they have each received from you on their status update.  You could extend this activity by getting students to swap their sheets and write comments for each other to respond to before handing them back.  I like this activity because I get a clear idea of the extent to which individual students have understood the subject matter, and the starter activity is differentiated to each student.

Why not give it a go?

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