Fakebooking it

Fakebooking it

History is one of my favourite subjects – it always has been ever since a high school teacher made trenches out of tables in class and pretended to machine gun us with his metre ruler to demonstrate trench warfare in WWI.

But, by the end of the Semester, my learners and I were getting a bit drained.  According to the Australian Curriculum for Year 5, we still needed to look at a significant person who helped to shape an Australian colony.  Colony influencers if you will.  This sparked an idea.  Who would my learners consider as influencers?  Most of them were people that had a heavy social media presence. Then, I found a wonderful free educational tool called Fakebook.

So here’s what we did.  I gave them a list of ‘colony influencers’ and then they conducted research, which could then be turned into posts as though their influencer was living in modern times.  It’s a pretty cool website to use.  Posts are written, and then you can make their ‘friends’ comment.  Pictures, links and videos can all be inserted.

The friends list and hobby list can also be updated.  It has a neat search feature which finds photos linked to the name of the person that you enter, which is usually pretty accurate – it can be changed as necessary though.

Fakebook, being a teaching tool even came with an assessment rubric, which I tweaked to suit the project.  My learners and I had a lot of fun with this tool, as while they were learning history, and working on timelines, they also got to show off their senses of humour. (Such as Lord Sydney throwing a party when Sydney got named after him, as announced by Governor Arthur Philip on his Fakebook account!

Two of the complete Fakebook posts made by my learners can be found here.

Caroline Chisholm and Governor Arthur Phillip.

We were also able to have quite a few thought provoking discussions about social media, cyber safety, and keeping safe online.

A couple of tips:

  • Make sure that learners write their posts and comments somewhere else first, such as in OneNote or on Word.  Then they can copy and paste them directly.  Fakebook won’t save a page until five posts have been created, so this was the best way to ensure that work in progress wasn’t lost.
  • A unique URL is created for each Fakebook page.  Learners need to copy and paste this somewhere safe to make sure that they can return to the page again, and more importantly – so it can be assessed!
  • The page will be password protected so that only authorised people can edit the page.  Again, make sure this password is put somewhere safe!

I’ll definitely use Fakebook again in the future.  It was fun, different, and had my learners re-enthused about doing research and turning facts into something that related more to their own lives.  I wonder if there is a fake Twitter or Instagram out there?

 

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