Mr. Mohammad Mukhit Abdul Gaffar Kazi

 Paper Index :

 Institution : Sinhgad Dental College and Hospital Pune

Abstract

Information technology has become an integral part of everyone including dental students. Rather technology is transforming dental students and education enormously. Students of the twenty first century belong to a generation that has grown up with universal access to online information and are often referred as digital natives or the Google generation¹.

Students can now access huge quantities of information from a diversity of sources at their own convenience and practically from any location. There are various methods of connectivity through emails, Facebook, WhatsApp etc. which are available at their own mobile and computers very easily.

Social media originally provided for socialization but are gradually used for educational purposes by many students. Using the potential of connectivity through the social media for educational purpose is a talk of the current era. Recent studies have found that including social media tools into traditional educational environments increases student learning and collaborations².

In India, the social media for the purpose of education is hardly being used. Use of android mobiles by the students has increased tremendously in the world and in India.  There are various domains available in social media especially Facebook. Facebook is a social networking website where over 750 million individuals share photos, videos, and commentary³.

Initially Facebook was designed for college students only which were open to everyone⁴.  It is useful website where you can post a comment and can upload videos, photos very easily.  This capacity to com­municate effortlessly has altered Facebook into an influential virtual community with endless possibilities.

Considering the easy access through the computers and android mobiles, learning process can be made available to the students by using social media. Learning microbiology through such websites will improve the knowledge amongst the dental students. 

 REFERANCES

The summary should contain Context of the study (Word limit 100 words out of 500) 

Information technology is a boost to all human to interact through various social media such as Facebook. Everyone is well aware of the use of these technologies for various purposes such as sharing their thoughts, photos etc.

Every student has got android mobile phone or computer of their own from which they can access the knowledge from anywhere at their ease. A thought of using this potential of student was in the mid as a teacher of microbiology.

So, decided after going through the extensive faculty development program in regional center Aundh of MUHS as advance course MET.

Learning microbiology is little difficult for students and especially for dental students. They have a full microbiology curriculum in their second year BDS course.

Use of social media as teaching learning methodology was one of innovative idea which has been never tried in India as per our knowledge. Only few studies have been done in western countries for efficacy.

So the present study was taken to know the feasibility, acceptability and the performance.

The overall feedback was very good about the concept and idea of learning microbiology with the help of Facebook. Students have provided very positive feedback about the project. Even the Facebook group performed well than the controls group. But this is very preliminary type of study and need more time and continuous efforts to see long term effects.

But overall activity was very much interactive during project work. They requested to continue further also.