First, I wanted to thank those of you who responded to my query about using Facebook in the classroom. I have not been able to personally contact everyone who responded to that message, but I definitely will do that in the coming days. Second, I wanted to follow up that initial post with another question. I find myself struggling quite a bit right now in terms of trying to structure a particular assignment I would like my students to work on, and I was hoping I could pick your brains a bit. As I mentioned before, I teach statistics (mostly at the graduate level), and one goal I have for students in the class is that they become more statistically literate and they develop the skills to critically analyze statistics they hear about or read about in the news. This summer, I came to class every day and brought in a recent news story I had found that made use of statistics or presented statistical information (sometimes in a misleading way), and we'd spend a little time talking about that. Statistics are all around us all the time, and it was not hard to find things to bring to my students to talk about. I now want to give my students opportunities to share news stories they find with me and each other, and I have some ideas, but I'm not sure of the best way to go. Initially, I was wondering if I could encourage students to tweet about news articles they find that include statistics, or if I could set up a group in Facebook where students would come to post links to articles and talk a bit about these articles. I envision an assignment where each student would have to share a certain number of news stories AND show me that he or she has taken the time to critically reflect on the news story and relate it to something learned in class. Because of this, Twitter might not be the best option since we are limited in terms of characters, but I can see students sharing a short link and then including a question of some kind or a comment on the methodology used in the study (I actually did try using Twitter awhile ago as an extra credit opportunity for students and it seemed to work out okay). Of course, I know not all students will have Facebook or Twitter accounts, and even those who do may not be comfortable using those tools in an educational context. So, I was thinking maybe it would be better to set up a class blog of some kind. However, then I start thinking about the fact that not all of my students are going to be technologically savvy, and using a blog may be a frustrating experience for some of them, unless I can very easily show them how to post things to the blog and insert hyperlinks and videos if necessary. What makes things a little bit more tricky is that this fall, I am teaching two sections of this introductory statistics course--one totally online and one in the classroom--and I would like to use this assignment in both sections. I can easily show my classroom students how to blog, but I may not have the opportunity to meet all my online students in person, so I need to figure out other ways to show them how to blog. A nice thing about a blog is that it's something everyone in class would be able to contribute to, and therefore everyone in class will see all the postings and be able to comment on each others' posts. So, I'm leaning toward this, but I wonder if anyone has experience trying to set up a class blog and how that has worked. Do you have any words of wisdom to share? Or, can you think of any other ideas that I might want to consider? One last thing I am thinking about is setting up a "Statistics in the News" assignment but giving students several choices about how they can complete the assignment. The could (a) contribute to a class blog I set up, (b) post things in a Facebook group I set up, (c) tweet about statistics in the news, or (d) come up with their own way to share, given the caveat that they think of something that would incorporate technology in some way (e.g., maybe create a YouTube video, or set up their own blog or website, etc.). I like this idea in that I would hope that each student could find something that appeals to him or her (thus making this assignment something more interesting and engaging). On the flip side, it would be more work for me, and I'm not sure I'm up to that. Thanks again for your feedback! It's great to have this group to bounce ideas off of. Sincerely, Michelle Everson -- Michelle Everson, Ph.D. Quantitative Methods in Education Department of Educational Psychology University of Minnesota gaddy001@umn.edu 612-624-0691 http://www.tc.umn.edu/~delma001/CATALST/