How students perceive educational support through Facebook

Since the beginning of the 21stcentury social media has expanded world-wide in all aspects of human lives Mainly for the youth they have been a natural part of their “digital ecosystem” As the results of the surveys of social media use by teens, carried by the Pew Research Centre, showed, in 2014 in the USA 71 % of teens reported being Facebook users and no other platform was used by a clear majority of the interviewed In 2018, three further online platforms, other than Facebook, have been reported by the significant majority of the teens These were YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat As to Facebook, “only” 51 % of the respondents stated to be Facebook users Furthermore, smartphone ownership has become a ubiquitous element of teen life Up to 95 % of teens have reported they have a smartphone or access to one, and 45 % of teens have proclaimed they are online on a near-constant basis Even more important, they are becoming more and more used, in the time of the world-wide corona pandemic and the need for connection in social quarantine As for teachers and their opinions on social media, on the one hand they are aware of their usefulness as regards to sharing information or organizing school tasks But on the other hand, they identify social media as a reason for the pupils and students` low attention during classes at school But since the youth devote a lot of time to social media, there is no point of not using these means also in education, as shown by the current efforts to organize education processes during the corona pandemic At the Faculty of Education, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, we have been aware of the significance of the social media in relation to different aspects of education and pedagogical communication That is why for several years, attention has been paid to this new education phenomenon The paper presents the authors experiences with the use of Facebook as a mean of support for education while the main focus is given to the results of a questionnaire survey which examined students` opinions and attitudes towards Facebook (before the pandemic situation), in comparison with Moodle, as a new phenomenon in university education © 2020, Kazan Federal University All rights reserved