Meneduca — Social school network to support the educational environment

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have changed the way of interacting and how knowledge is transmitted. In addition, the last decade represented a revolution in the way the society interacts, due to the intense use of social networks. Social networks could also be considered a Big Data application due to the volume, variety and velocity of data that are created on them. Meneduca, a social network focused on educational environments, is intended to increase communication among teachers, students and parents in order to improve students´ performance. The system also aims to provide data to help to form groups for school tasks, based on the students´ personalities; for this, the Big Five Test is used. The results of the application of the Big Five allows forming working groups, whose members have heterogeneous personalities, i.e., with greater variety of ideas and skills. In addition, teachers can propose different themes for academics works, based on the preferences of their students captured from networks such as Facebook. The Meneduca was proposed to investigate two aspects about social networks: (1) as a data source for other applications, as recommender systems; (2) as an educational aid tool.