Advantages and disadvantages of a tutor blog and Facebook group for teaching English Language

Nowadays, internet is growing rapidly. Users can get updates from second to second to seek daily and business information. In the world, either from the artists, officials, teenagers, and even students as young as ten years old had already their personal accounts in different sites of internet. internet has become very important part of our life. It helps us in many ways and also harming us in other ways.

Blog: A blog is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete and very much informal in writing. There are three types of blogs for use in language classes. These are:

1.     The Tutor Blog

2.     The Class Blog

3.     The Learner Blog

The Tutor Blog is run by the teacher of a class. The content of this type of blog can be limited to syllabus, course information, homework, assignments, etc. Or the teacher may choose to write about his or her life, sharing reflections about the local culture, target culture and language to stimulate online and in-class discussion. In this type of blog, students are normally restricted to being able to write comments to the teacher's posts.

Bloggers and many other regular Internet users are well aware of Blogs and Facebook. In addition, interested learners should be aware of sites like Blog and Facebook, where users can quickly and easily create their own blogs for free.

However, Tutor Blog and Facebook Group are very helpful in learning and teaching English language.

Advantages and disadvantages of Tutor Blog 

Advantages
1. They made everything easy for you.
2. You are already following most web standards in the web by using a popular form of blogging.
3. Syndication of way to become popular by distributing your content is pretty easy with a blog.
4. SEO is also easier when you use a blog, especially if that blog allows you to write script like the blogspot.net.
5. It's an easy way to give fresh content to your users.
6. It keeps track of the time when your articles were published.
7. You can host multiple independent sites from blog CMS like Wordpress.
Disadvantages
1. The navigation is usually based on dates or categories
3. Even when you can create other pages, they may not be fully customizable.
4. Most blogs don't allow the user to edit the code, or adding new scripts.
5. Blogs may not be seen the same as webpages by search engines.
6. You may not be able to use SSL encryption, email
Actually most of these disadvantages may apply to free blogs and not to self hosted blogs.
Self-hosted blogs could offer all the advantages of a full flesh website by installing modules.

Facebook :  Facebook is a popular free social networking website that allows registered users to create profiles, upload photos and video, send messages and keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues. The site is available in 37 different languages. Many teachers and students are familiar with using digital media, for instance, Facebook for private communication and for participating in groups. The familiarity with the use of groups on Facebook opens the possibility for teachers to create groups for educational purposes. Enabling creative learning design through semantic technologies. Crossing boundaries: Identity management and student/faculty relationships on the Facebook  in order to discuss themes related to classroom practices with their students. The connection between teachers and students provided by Facebook can potentially be an addition to learning environments were students’ engagement is limited by the lack of communication between teachers and students.

Advantages of Facebook group:

• Facebook group helps to find right the students with similar interest. 
• Members can share any necessary documents from internet and can post it in the group to share with everyone.
• As Facebook is quite handy, students can check the group regularly seeing the notification instantly. 
• Facebook group keeps everyone in a loop to get informative information in one click.
• Group members can interact directly with anyone at any place, who may have questions.
• Students can also have group chat, tagging, sharing related pictures and videos with the group members.
• Facebook group keeps everyone in a loop to get informative information in one click.
• Group members can interact directly with anyone at any place, who may have questions.

Disadvantages of Facebook group:

•  In Bangladesh, the users of Facebook from class 8 would be very poor and whoever are using, are not that much well aware to find out the educational elements from Facebook group.
• Students are more likely to join groups that are affect their personal or social life rather than created for educational purpose. They show less loyalty on the group.
•  The young students are more interested in socializing with friends in Facebook rather than searching for educational purpose.

 In sum, those are some advantages and disadvantages by using Facebook account. It is okay that people think that Facebook is a fantastic social networking tool. The reality today, it is difficult stop people to visiting Facebook especially students. I think students should not use this account too often. Education is the most important thing, if the students use Facebook too much it can be disturb their concentration in study. It will be better if students more responsible not waste nor abuse their time.