Many teenagers spend much of their free time in a virtual world, and the school world can be peripheral to the connections they make through TV or a computer screen. As our society becomes more and more driven by social media, Facebook opens a door to meet students where they are and to create informal educational connections outside of the classroom.

Why did we become history teachers? For me it was because I love exploring this country and its past. I take great joy in visiting museums and historic sites to learn about hidden pieces of our past. I spend time every year experiencing different states and growing my understanding of how geography and regional culture shaped past events and affect politics today.

Unfortunately, all of those verbs—"exploring," "visiting," and "experiencing"—have limitations in the school system, so as teachers we need to look for new and creative tools that are within our reach. Since I began teaching, my students have been on my mind during my adventures, especially those within my own city—Washington, DC. I wish that they could have the experiences that I have, or at least be aware that these experiences exist. It was somewhere along this line of thought that I realized my guilty pleasure, Facebook, could actually be a useful academic tool. I started a project to learn more about Facebook's potential to engage and nurture lifelong historians.

To preface, this project will be described as an addition to classroom learning. For those John Dewey enthusiasts squeezed out by test prep, Facebook offers an opportunity for your students to explore and engage at will. Rather than mandating participation, the teacher enters the students' world and offers various resources that students may choose to read and interact with. Here are some of the many ways that Facebook can be utilized:

Sharing Visual Aids
My original idea was primarily to utilize Facebook for my visual learners, to help support vocabulary and historic concepts. Images can be found on Google within seconds, but presenting images from your own life provides relevance and tangibility. A smartphone is helpful to upload pictures as you take them and therefore to also model that history is alive and active in your life.

Examples: If we were studying city life during the colonial period and I traveled to Boston, I would upload a photo of a historic building to demonstrate the small windows and brick-laying techniques. As a nature lover in a city school, uploading photos has been especially helpful with geographic terms, such as "marsh" and "plains," that the students are unfamiliar with.

Modeling a Love For History
All of our cities and towns have their own unique history and hidden treasures. While I spend a great deal of time in local parks and museums, my students, like many teenagers, repeatedly tell me that they spend weekends at the movies, sports, or the mall. I do not think this is simply because they are not interested or cannot get to cultural sites, but because it does not occur to them to go. Post a status update saying that you are listening to a presidential address or watching a historical movie. Let them know you are at a museum or just heard a fun fact. Take pictures on a trip when you stumble upon an old cemetery or find a family heirloom. Let the students know when you feel excited about being a history nerd!

Highlighting Current Events
Those less practiced in Facebook may not realize that it can literally be a newsfeed. By clicking to post a "link" instead of "status," you can link your students to any online news source. These could be articles that you think they should all be aware of or articles that may interest a particular group of students.

In addition, any number of politicians, NGOs, and national celebrities have Facebook pages, and this Facebook world is likely not the one that your students pay attention to. If they see that you are "Facebook friends" with Barack Obama and John Boehner, this might prompt them to check both Facebook profiles out and learn more.

Creating Interactive Puzzles
I get the best response when I post interactive puzzles for the students. They can be about anything you are studying or a review throwback to the beginning of the year.

Examples: In the Smithsonian American Art Museum, there is a piece that combines license plates from all 50 states that spell out the words of the Declaration of Independence. I took a quick picture and then posted this up with "Who can tell us what this is?" Several students chimed in.

Questions and puzzles like this can come in many forms, and do not need to relate to museums. For instance, a new movie is coming out called Jumping Over the Broom and I plan to post a link to the movie and ask if anyone remembers the historic significance of this tradition to slave life.

Expanding Student Choices
Most students love activities which involve the computer and social media, and the more we can do to spark interest, the better. There are many ways to use Facebook for turning in assignments or expanding on in-class participation.

Example: When discussing slavery, I asked students what one carries with them when deprived of everything. The students had to go home and look for skills or knowledge that the enslaved could have brought with them across the ocean. They were invited to either bring in items or describe what they had found. As another option, students could post what they found on Facebook. I also posted my own pictures that weekend: a drum, a quilt, and a woven basket to show that the skills brought by the enslaved Africans are seen everywhere.

Giving Shout-Outs and Recognition
Up to this point, you may be able to complete the same goals with a blog—but a unique aspect of Facebook is public recognition. Your teenage students are used to sharing their happiness and sadness and pride across a computer screen so go ahead and jump in! For those wary of causing embarrassment, I recommend sticking to recognizing the whole class. This is fun because it gathers lots of "likes" and revs up the competition.

Building Community
Facebook was designed as an online community and is therefore built to create feelings of belonging. Teachers can share pictures of field trips the students went on, follow along with a topic important to the community, and create special groups relevant to school. Some of my students who are shy in class seem to have a different online personality and are more likely to comment and join in through the computer.

Encouraging a Sense of Ownership and Interest in Our Country
In teaching history, we are passing on ownership of this country, but many students in many cities and towns have not been more than one or two states away. If my Washington, DC students skim pictures of the Oregon coast, Arches National Park, or a New Mexico Indian reservation, my greatest hope would be that the pictures make them want to visit more of our amazing country. Even if they are content where they are, they can at least be more culturally aware and form a broader definition of national diversity.

Securing Privacy
In setting up this project, the first thing to do is to establish a secure Facebook page at www.facebook.com. I recommend the following steps to ensure privacy:

• Separate this account from any other Facebook account that you have.
• Add only the information that you are comfortable with. I added my favorite books, some inspirational quotes, and a few historical movies to my profile. In this account, I also chose to include some pictures of myself and my family and created a couple of photo albums with facts about places I had been.
• Ensure that all of your security settings are set to "Friends Only." This is for the security of the students who "friend" you. It allows only those students who have friended you to have access to your page and your pictures.
• If you do have a personal Facebook account, I recommend double checking that your settings on it are secure before going online with your teacher account. I temporarily switched my personal profile picture to a landscape so that if the students were searching for me, they would select and friend my teacher account, which had a photo of me as the profile picture.

Ensuring Consent
Before just "friending" all of your students, there are a couple necessary steps to take. First, I sought approval from the principal and then I sent a letter home for all of the parents. The parents had to sign the permission slip before any online contact could be established. In this letter, I welcomed the families to join my community on Facebook if they were uncomfortable with their children doing so. Within this letter, I included an additional item about whether I could post pictures of the kids on Facebook. Most parents who agreed to let their children participate in the project agreed to let them participate in all of its aspects.

Facebook has so much potential for being an educational tool, but I cannot claim I have had full success quite yet. I plan to continue experimenting until this initiative matches the vision that I have for it. Here are some of the challenges I faced.

Encouraging Buy-In
Once everything was set up, then I needed to hook my students. If they did not want to join in, everything was for naught. To present the project to them, I emphasized the "shout-out" portion of the activity and told them that I would offer some project options only on Facebook. I only received about a 40% opt-in rate. On the plus side, the kids who participated were probably the most likely to actually search out the educational articles and pictures that I posted. Next year, I plan to start this project with the beginning of the year paperwork to see if that increases participation.

Creating Routine
It was very difficult for me to create a routine that involved regularly updating my student Facebook account. Facebook is justifiably blocked on my school network so this always had to be an outside-of-work project. Everything I did for the project therefore felt like extra. Next year, I plan to start from the beginning with a commitment to posting biweekly to create more of a routine for myself and the students.

Maintaining Distance
I recommend avoiding skimming your students' pages. There is just information out there that we do not want to know. I requested from the students and in the parent letter that students only allow me access to their Limited Profile, a setting that does not allow me full access to the students' conversations.

Also, be aware that commenting on your students' status may be seen as invasive. I have commented now and then when it was relevant specifically to school or current issues involving social studies or social justice. In my opinion, especially early in the year, teachers may be better off viewing Facebook interaction as one-way.

Facing the Inequity of Computers
Utilizing media outside of the classroom involves inevitable inequities. Since Facebook is blocked at most schools and some students cannot leisurely browse the Internet at home, this project does give some students an unfair advantage. I have not found a way to work around this.

I hope that other teachers experiment with this online tool, and would love to hear about any successes or receive feedback. For the first time in history, teachers can reach their students during the after-school at-home hours to build community, provide historic resources, and truly offer the type of engagement that allows us teachers to declare ourselves lifelong learners.

During the 2008–2009 school year, in an effort to integrate more technology into my classroom I started blogging with my students about history class. Because I was pretty new to blogging and wasn’t sure how it would go, I did one collective site for the 8th grade. Basically, the students wrote and I uploaded it to the blog. As the year went on, I logged in for students and they took over the maintenance of the site. Sometimes the writing was an assignment and I chose the best ones to post. Other times, I offered extra credit if they posted about a topic provided. And still other times I loved what a student wrote and typed it up for the blog. This site ended up being a wonderful compilation of our year come June. I still use it as a preview site for students, parents, and pre-service teachers I work with, as to what we do during the year. The blog can be viewed at http://shmshistoryclass.blogspot.com/.

That same year, an after-school group that is co-sponsored by myself and a friend from the National Park Service took a cross-country trip for Lincoln’s Bicentennial. I created another blog for the students to document their adventures and for friends and family back home to be able to find us. What was nice was that because I had been working with the blog in history class, my students were aware of how a blog works and were familiar with how to write for it and their audience. Each student was required to write three times for the blog during the course of our week-long adventure. Each night after our full day they would write on either paper or share the two laptops we brought for blogging. Before going to bed each night I would upload any remaining blog entries. The system proved effective for sharing our adventures and for students documenting their days. The site has also become a great way for Jen Epstein, my National Park Service co-organizer, to share what she is doing in schools for outreach. View it here: http://stampslincoln.blogspot.com/.

With two school group blogs under my belt, I decided to ramp it up for the 2009–2010 school year. I wanted students to be able to learn how to blog . . . not just post, but learn the process. I set out the planning of it before school started. Basically, I decided to have students choose their groupmates in the class they were in. I have approximately 100 students each year and about 25 per history class. I asked them to be in groups of three or four students.

Once they chose their groups (and we discussed the characteristics of a quality groupmate, both in a group partner and as a group partner—they are 8th grade after all!), I gave them a sheet that asked them to record their group member names, create a name for their blog, and to write a username and a password that they would remember (not one that was already in use by one of the group members!). I created Google accounts for each student using the information provided, noting on their sheet, if a username was taken, the reassigned username.

Generally, I’ve found that it takes about a week for me to set up the 30 or so email accounts and blog sites. I introduce the blog and what it will be about, how it will be used, etc., and then come back to it about a week later once I’ve created the accounts and site. We spend a full double block learning to log in, changing the appearance of the blog, and learning to post. We generally do the first blog post together. We discuss the elements of a quality blog post—what am I looking for? Points I stress are that it is still for class—correct English grammar must be used. For all intents and purposes, I am their audience (so it should remain as formal writing), and the blog is only for history class. I do not want to read about their weekend experiences on this blog.

Usually, after a guest speaker they have a blog update to do. Sometimes they turn in an assignment and then I ask them to cut and paste what they have typed and to post it. Other times I have them work as a group to post a response to something in class.

I find that they’re pretty excited about the blogs and they like to write on them. I’ve learned that a clear rubric is key to success—for the students but for my grading as well. Just as any teacher would do for a writing assignment, it is important to lay out the criteria for the post in advance. Am I grading on content? Spelling? Grammar? Reflection? When grading 30 blogs, it becomes ultra important to be able to know what I’m looking for, especially because their posts can vary so much.

Another important note to consider is deadlines. Because students aren’t turning in a physical paper, it’s easy for them to forget deadlines and to overlook them. I find that it’s important to have a final cut-off date for grading blogs . . . along with a lot of reminders. Many parents are not familiar with blogging and so I find that it is important to be very clear with parents about expectations as well. Last year I ran a parent workshop and walked parents through the what, how, and why of blogging so that they could better support their children at home . . . and because I was getting a lot of questions!

I’m fortunate enough to have a classroom set of laptops and a relatively new and working internet system. However, the number of computers is what has dictated my choices for class blog site vs. small group blog sites. When I started in 2008, I had only two laptops and a desktop, with no permanent and/or regular access to a classroom set of computers.

My recommendation would be to start small—either with a classroom blog or with a select group of students. Simultaneously, I was blogging on a personal blog and it helped for me to play around with my own blog. I found the Google help site for Blogger very helpful when teaching my students. Pages can be printed and copied for students and then put in their notebooks to be referenced. (Editor's note: If you're using a different blogging service, look for that service's support documentation.)

For me, blogs are really flexible—for both time and content. While I’ve used them for the duration of a school year, they would be great for a unit project or a semester project. And for those students who are really savvy, it’s a great way to engage them by having them add other multimedia objects to their blogs and to embed links to related content material.

The ideas truly are endless! The winter break and other school breaks really lend themselves to my own exploration time on the blog. It allows me to see what I could implement with my students and to think about how it might further benefit what I am teaching in the classroom. Just remember to give yourself a head start and don’t be afraid to play around! Blogging can be wonderful for both you and the students!

History teachers (tend to) love history. Students do not (often) love it so much. This is a perplexing situation that I have bounced around in my brain for the past two decades. When I was a student, I liked the teachers and felt as though I was being educated, but I did not love my history classes. That is until I enrolled in a special freshman seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire: "Medieval Foundations of the Modern West," co-taught by a history professor, Dr. Thomas Miller, and an Academic Adviser with an art degree, Jeannie Harms. This course was about nurturing freshmen as students but also approaching history from an interdisciplinary angle. It was incredibly unconventional and I loved every minute of it. There was a significant 'visualness' to the history—we were constantly digging into paintings and illustrations and artifacts of the era to extract their history, for ourselves.

As I developed my own classroom practice, it occurred to me that I needed to include that compelling visual component in my teaching as much as possible. Some years I have been more successful than others at achieving that balance, and there have been years when I was more acutely aware of the need. Consider this student: a 12-year-old girl with a 2nd-grade reading/writing level, identified with a specific learning disability in both areas. She is in my classroom in adherence with the inclusion model. I quickly realize that her struggles with the written word have nothing to do with her capacity for logic and critical thinking. She is bright and actively participates in class discussion, but is left out of the conversation much of the time because the reading and writing stand between her and the ideas. To address her identified areas of struggle, she is scheduled into small, intensive remedial classes, but much of the content is well below her actual intellect; she is bored.

I began to realize that if I introduced the concepts visually, this student was much more motivated to attempt the assignment even though she struggled. In addition, her ability to engage verbally in the discussion and group work related to the content improved. Here's the other bonus moment—introducing concepts in a visual way motivated most of the kids. It helped them to access the ideas or get hooked by the story so that they then wanted, all on their own, to know more, inquire, and dig. Two minutes of historical video on the Space Race can get a room of 13-year-olds completely rapt and intrigued. A famous political cartoon with clever components can provoke a stream of compelling questions. An infographic comparing unemployment rates in the Great Depression to those today can link the personal experiences of the students today to the historical concept of the Great Depression, helping them look for commonality and divergence in the events. As teachers of history we often place reading and writing before discussion, leaving behind those students averse to or struggling with the written word. By flipping the compelling component to the front of the day or lesson, students are much more likely to buy into the learning. I learned this all those years ago in that freshman seminar.

As technology advanced and I began to use more video, I also stumbled across the occasional data visualization. My interest was piqued. These visualizations were not just a way to capture interest but also a way to introduce highly complex ideas and relationships quickly, so as to elevate the level of dialogue and inquiry. One such example is GapMinder from Hans Rosling. If you have never investigated this tool, I dare you to spend less than an hour on your first visit. Watching the bobbing and weaving of country data through time makes the data beautiful and meaningful to many students and fills them with curiosity. The visualizations created by Slate and The Guardian for the unrest in North Africa and the Middle East deliver a deluge of rich information to the learner in forms that suggest connections between events, geography, and time. Tools like these can include the vast majority of learners, regardless of reading ability, in a dialogue of ideas and critical thought.

This is not to say that we shouldn't work with students on their areas of struggle, but we can teach students to access and assess content in more ways than just reading and writing. That 12-year-old girl taught me that seeing a student as a voraciously curious brain and not just a reader/writer was critically important. We teach the whole child, not just the parts that decode letters. Our history classrooms have the ability to become fertile ground where citizens engage in truly enriching dialogue about issues of import. I want to involve all of my students in the conversation, not just those interested in the history or those that can access the reading, but all the students, their interests piqued by engaging and relevant resources about which they can ask thoughtful questions.