You are probably most familiar with the personal side of Facebook. These Facebook pages, or profiles as they are known, are meant to represent a single individual. Organizations (including courses) of any type do not create profiles, rather they create Facebook Pages. These Pages are distinct presences, separate from user profiles, and are designed to communicate, distribute information/content, and engage users. Facebook Pages are designed to be media rich and content rich resulting in a strong relationship with the user (student).

The process to set up a course page is quite simple. Once you have the page setup you need to invite your students to join it. Once they join, every update and addition that you make to the course page, be it text, pictures or links, will appear on their personal Facebook feed.

View a Step-by-Step guide to setting up a course Facebook page below:

Videos on just about any topic can be found on YouTube. Incorporating videos in your classroom or your online course is a great way to make the material more engaging for your students. Use it to show demonstrations of how things work or as a tool to complete an assignment. You can also use it to teach video production and editing skills through the completion of projects. Completed projects can then be uploaded to your course YouTube channel.

When you search YouTube, you see the number of videos available on any given topic, and you also very quickly see the many ways that YouTube can be of benefit to your course. Whether you’re an instructor or a student, YouTube can prove useful. Incorporating material is easy to do but permission to use must be sought out and proper credit must be attributed.

How to Set up an Account and Start Using YouTube

Blogs are great tools for instructors who want to add additional context to their courses. They also work particularly well as a reflective learning tool for your students. Writing a blog post allows them to reflect on what they have learned and relate it to something familiar.

Blogs work particularly well for students because they can be worked on any time, in any place with an Internet-enabled computer. Hence, they can be used by instructor to create an online classroom environment that extends beyond the boundaries of the course.

In addition to providing instructors with an excellent tool for communicating with students, there are specific educational benefits of blogs. Blogs are:

A blog is a web based diary that allows a "blogger" to publish text, links, pictures, and video to the web in a discrete entry called a Blog Post. Once published, readers can provide feedback to the blog post. Blog entries are recorded and displayed in reverse chronological order and can be edited by the author. Blogger (owned by Google) is a popular blogging site that is no more difficult to use than a conventional word processing software.

Blogging software such as Blogger is free. The main investment, and this should not be overlooked, is the time taken to create and read the content. Blogs humanise your course. It allows the opinions and personalities of both instructors and students to shine through.

• Highly motivating to students, especially those who otherwise might not become participants in classrooms.
• Excellent opportunities for students to read and write.
• Effective forums for collaboration and discussion.
• Powerful tools to enable scaffolded learning or mentoring to occur.

Blogger is just one of the many free blogging tools available. For simplicity, we will focus on this one, however, you do have many options and the operation of each blogger platform is similar.

Go to www.blogger.com
Provide the necessary information requested. (username, password)
Create a relevant title for your blog.
Accept terms and select a template.
Publish!

The following video from YouTube entitled How to Create a Blog with Blogger gives an excellent overview of how to get started.

Not only can students follow each other and their instructor, they can also follow people and organizations in the field of their study. Hash tags also enable searching of given topics. Twitter is a rising star in the Social Media world, especially among users of mobile devices such as smart phones. It's an easy-to-use messaging tool designed for quick communication with an individual or with a group.

Tweeting

When a person posts an update to their Twitter account, that update is then known as a "tweet" and the user is said to have "tweeted". Tweet can be used as a noun, referring to the actual written update, or a verb,referring to the action of publishing an update.

Following

In Twitter, if you follow someone or something, it means that you will automatically receive that person's/organization's Twitter updates. Each time that person posts an update on Twitter, it instantly appears on your Twitter home page. Updates for all the people you sign up to follow appear in reverse chronological order with the most recent update on top of the page. Likewise, people can sign up to follow you.
You can easily find people on Twitter by typing in their username or their real name and searching for them in the search box. Once you have located them in the list, simply click on the Follow button.

@reply (Public)

@reply precedes public messages sent from one person to another. Public tweets can be seen by anyone. These messages appear on Twitter updates as @username (eg: @johnsmith).

Direct Messages (Private)

A direct message is a private message from one Twitter user to another. You can only view your direct messages in your direct message Inbox after you log into your Twitter account. You can only send a direct message to Twitter users that you are already following.

Using Hastags (#)

A hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages. To add a hashtag simply place a # before the tagword (no spaces).
Clicking on a hashtagged word in any message shows you all other Tweets in that category. Hashtags can occur anywhere in the Tweet - at the beginning, middle, or end. Hashtagged words that become very popular are often Trending Topics.

Adding Links
To add a link to you tweet simply copy the web address to the link and paste it in your tweet.

The following video from Howcast entitled How to Use Twitter provides an excellent overview of how to get started.

In the educational environment, Google Docs facilitates group projects. No matter where students are they can contribute to a paper and share and save their contributions with each other online (known as Cloud Computing). Google Drive provides 5GB of free storage.

Google software closely resembles Word, (Google Docs), Excel (Google Sheets) and PowerPoint (Google Slides) so students and instructors alike can access and use the application with relative ease. Google is also fully compatible with Microsoft Office file formats.

Access Google Drive