Facebook Live

Name of Tool	Website URL	Cost	Download or Web-based	1 sentence description of the tool
Facebook Live	www.facebook.com	Free	Web-based	Facebook Live is a live video stream on Facebook that allows you to broadcast yourself or activities on social media to your friends and followers.

Description of the Tool

Facebook Live is a feature that includes live broadcasting from a Facebook profile. It allows you to show your profile followers and friends a live broadcast that will show up in the News Feed. Viewers can also subscribe to specific profile’s Facebook Live by clicking the “LIVE SUBSCRIBE”. Subscribing allows Facebook to send you notifications alerting you that the channels you have subscribed to are live.

How to Use This Tool

Hub Spot provides step by step pictures for going Live on Facebook. I will provide a description of each step to going live. If you would like a visualization of going live, you can visit https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/facebook-live-guide.

Going live should appear at the top of your Facebook News Feed where you update your status. There is a “LIVE” option at the top of your Facebook Feed. You must grant to Facebook to your camera and microphone. Next, you can choose if your video will be shown to everyone one Facebook, just your friends, or friends except. You can write a description about your video, tag friends, add an activity, or broadcast your location. You are then ready to begin your video.

How Can This Tool be Used by the Trainer/Teacher?

Facebook Live can be used by a trainer/teacher for many purposes. A teacher could create a Facebook Live video and tell their students to tune in to it as a lesson and worth assignment points. A teacher could also offer extra credit to students who tuned into a live broadcast for something that would supplement the lesson material. Teachers could also host a live Question and Answer broadcast for students.

Trainers could use this video to broadcast their training and describe what would be shown at the training seminar. Trainers could also provide online training through the live broadcast. It would be a mandatory training session, but if some people were unable to attend the training seminar could still view the training.

Another way trainers could use this live feature is to ask for feedback on the training course and allow for questions to be asked. Being able to provide feedback and have others chime in on if they agree or disagree and why they can be beneficial for each person. I think this would be more of a focus group, but it could be beneficial for all parties. The trainer could learn what he needs to focus on or emphasize more in order to achieve the objectives he/she is trying to achieve. It would be beneficial for the trainees by being freely able to talk about what they liked and disliked and their main takeaways from the training session. Allowing the trainees to ask questions and receive answers based on what they felt was unclear during the training session.

How Can This Tool be Used by the Trainer/Teacher to Support Student Learning?

This section could be used to support student learning in many different ways. This class is about learning technology tools that can enhance our professional careers. This class could easily require us, as students, to tune into a live broadcast to enhance our learning of this particular technology. I think it could also be used as a way to teach lessons to online students. If the teacher/professor feels it is important that the students can see their face, they could host a live broadcast at a certain time so the students could communicate with the teacher.

Another way that Facebook Live can support learning is quizzes could be administered through this live broadcast. If the teacher wanted to provide a quiz for a certain period of time, with the students seeing them, they could host a quiz online to ensure the students were engaged in the quiz.

How Can This Tool be Used by Students?

This tool can be used by students for a number of reasons. Students can broadcast and promote activities that are going on within a particular course. For example, if a course was constructed around writing a book about technology tools, you could gain insight from Facebook friends about the tech tools they are familiar with, what they use them for, and what they like and dislike about each tool. This could act as a focus group to gather data about a project and help get people involved that are interested in the live video.

Groups could work on Facebook at a certain time when working on group projects. One person from each group could take turns hosting the live session and they could communicate and work on their project during this time period. Granted, anyone can tune into a live session, but it may be beneficial to have outsiders input on your work to act as a peer-review to catch onto errors we wouldn’t otherwise notice.

Training and Other Resources

I used www.facebook.com to gather most of my information and to talk about the steps that it takes to create a live video. It is a simple task to achieve, if you find the Live tab at the top of your News Feed. Facebook breaks it down into simple steps to go live and prompts you with the same questions and additions you can create when you create a status update.

I also found a tutorial website that walks you through step by step, with pictures, to go live on Facebook. If you would live visualizations of going live, visit www.blog.hubspot.com/marketing/facebook-live-guide.

You can also visit www.youtube.com and type in “GOING LIVE ON FACEBOOK” and tutorial videos and other resources are available.

References

Facebook. (n.d.). Retrieved January 24, 2017 from www.facebook.com