Abstract:

The very fast growth and development of the internet in terms of structure, speed and applications enabled the emergence of interactive websites promoting collaboration in virtual environments. The digital social networks, typical examples of interactive environments arise with the proposal of being a space for building collaborative relationships, contacts, network points. From the 2000s, companies, journalists, politicians, major corporations, among other segments, realized the potential and importance of the social networking and began to explore them to enhance business goals, business relations, and other objectives. Only recently educational institutions and/or educators began to realize the importance of the usage of the networks with the goals of promoting education support within and outside the school context. This study examined the role of educators in the social network Facebook for educational purposes. Facebook was chosen because it allows free access and because there is a big number of users today. The study was conducted with five network groups and focused on the performance of teachers and students. The groups were chosen focusing on the educational purposes and considering they were in full activity. Interactions were observed in the environment, online questionnaires were applied to the students and online interviews were conducted with the teachers responsible for the groups. The survey revealed that teachers have not properly appropriated of the tools available on Facebook yet. They did not recognize the pedagogical possibilities of the social network and, therefore, they were not able to develop teaching methodology for teaching activities, although students were present on the network with greater frequency and with greater time spent in relation to teachers. Their participation in the groups with educational purpose was still weak and they could not understand the importance of the usage of the social networking in education.

Keywords:

Social network, collaboration in virtual environments, education, interactive websites.