Using Facebook for Collaborative Academic Activities in Education

In this article we will try to use the services of Facebook, in a controlled environment, so that teachers can carry out their teaching. From the educational point of view, Facebook provides a new starting point, collaborative work, from plugins development tailored to the needs of teachers in schools. And this requires to take into account the hierarchical structure and the distribution of groups and students in the center, and, to have a system to monitor the work of the students for assessment and grading. With the work proposed here, we do not intend to create a social network, conceived as "Facebook", but including a plugin that allows the use of "Facebook" like a Learning Management System (LMS). These features would make the social network "Facebook", offer collaborative services for members of the educational community, and compete with other applications, like Google Apps Education. Moreover, being a LMS in a collaborative and education environment, facilitate the management, rating and monitoring of student activities. The justification for this system comes from the high number of students and teachers who already have an account on the social network, and they are already used to their patterns of communication and interaction. This adaptation may allow greater use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and government resources that have been allocated to the project Escuela 2.0.