My experience with facebook as an informative and communicative tool

Facebook is an amazing application where we can share our memories and view others post, check what they are up to. It's running my fifth year using Facebook. I am able to view my posts from 2015 and I can always share those with my families and friends.

This year I have used Facebook as an application to share a video lesson. The video lesson is shared on a Facebook page, where my classmates have also posted a video. This page was an effective informative app, students who are in class 5 can easily visit the page and watch it to understand the topic.

I am also able to get the right information during times like covid19, where many users post false information through unreliable sources. I am get to read the right information thropugh reliable sources such as, Prime Minister's Office - PMO, Bhutan, World Health Organisation (WHO) and Ministry of Health, Royal Government of Bhutan. 

Reflection- ICT as a constructive tool

Constructivist approach to teaching and learning believes that students need to construct their own understanding of a subject through critical thinking and active engagement as independent learners. This provides students to learn in absence of teacher by using wide range of resources from the net.

ICT based constructive tools can help learners to manipulate information, visualize ones understanding, and construct one’s own knowledge.

Some examples of constructive ICT applications can be;

1.     Concept map; this allows the learner to brainstorm and visualize their understanding of relationship among a collection of concepts. There are plenty of applications that can help learners to connect ideas, organize information, and to incorporate new learning to their prior understanding of a subject. Some concept mapping apps are; MindMeister, Popplet, SimpleMind, and Inkflow Visual Notebook.

2.     Desktop publishing; these programs allows learners to organize and present their ideas in attractive format. These helps the learners to make an enhancement to their documents with an element of fun. Some applications include; Adobe Spark, Twixl, and PDFelement.

3.     Word, Spread Sheet and PowerPoint; these applications helps to organize, record, manipulate and present their ideas in an attractive in the form of memos, reports, letters, presentations and record routine information.

Reflection; ICT as a communicative tool

The communication between a teacher and the student is made easy through the use of different communicative applications. Discussions on a certain topic between teacher and student or amongst students can take place beyond the physical barrier either by space, time or both of the classroom.

Some of the most used applications for communication by teachers and students nowadays are:

1.     Google classroom

2.     Zoom

3.     Wechat

4.     Google hangouts

5.     E-mail

There are also other wonderful applications and virtual platforms that enables the communication between students and teachers. These includes;

1.     Facebook

2.     Skype

3.     Chat

4.     VLE(virtual learning environment)

5.     Blogs and so on.

These communication tools can be categorized into two types of communication, Synchronous and Asynchronous.

1.     Synchronous communication

This type of communication is said to be taken place real-time, in which users must be simultaneously connected. This type of communication;

ü  enables real-time communication

ü  are used for instructional activities that require higher degree of interaction

ü  helps solving urgent problems and issues

2.     Asynchronous communication

This type of communication doesn’t require the people communicating to be logged on the internet at the same time. It is appropriate for activities that require more time in thinking before responding.

            The above mentioned examples can fall under both the types of communication as it can be synchronous as well as asynchronous as it depends on the people who are using it.