Plenary Idea : Facebook Status

Here is a nice plenary activity that I created this year and have been meaning to share for a while. It has the added bonus of giving you a starter for your next lesson with only minimal work.

Students are generally familiar with Facebook and most if not all of them have Facebook accounts. So at the end of a lesson on several occasions this year, I’ve asked my class to sum up something they have learnt in a Facebook style status update. You could just use a plain piece of paper, but I also have a template for them, for which there is a link below.

The quality of responses will range from “John Jones knows what the marketing mix is” to “Suzy Smith now knows that the marketing mix consists of price, place, product and promotion, and that businesses must make sure that all these aspects are co-ordinated to be successful”. That doesn’t matter, because with a little bit of work you can turn these status updates in to the next lesson’s starter. Good Facebook status updates generate questions and comments from people, and so it usually takes me 5 minutes to write a comment that poses a follow up question to each student in a class of 20. To John Jones I might ask ‘Can you tell me what the four aspects of the marketing mix are?’. To Suzy I’ll ask ‘Give me an example of how a company might market a product in a way where the marketing mix isn’t very co-ordinated’. I then hand these back out to them at the start of the next lesson.

There are further options here, perhaps getting the class to pose the follow up comments/questions to each other or asking them to ‘post’ a photo (find and print) that links to their learning.

In any case I find it allows me to check students understanding, and challenge it with individual responses….I think Ofsted call it ‘Personalised Learning’. I hope you like it.

Download Facebook_template.pptx here