FACEBOOK‘S ROLE IN STUDENTS` SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

Facebook, having more than a billion users and being acceptable in more than 70 languages, is changing the ways of communication and sharing information of hundreds of millions of people. Lithuanian users is not an exception. Rapidly changing Facebook, has become an actual scientific research object. Scientists universally are investigating Facebook's influence on social life. However, Facebook is still quite a new phenomenon in science, and still uncertainty exists defining the most effective its research and usage methods and possibilities. In the last decade, a tendency has been observed, that Facebook is used not only for entertainment, leisure or communication, but more and more its educational functions and possibilities come to light. In 2016, a research was carried out (totally, 300 Lithuanian high school first to fourth course students participated in the research) about Lithuanian high school students' use of social network Facebook (FB), seeking to reveal how and what functions of a social network FB Lithuanian high school students use, how they value it, what is their opinion about FB influence on a person and what are the possibilities of FB educational use. It has been stated, that most of the students, assuming, that FB is a good communication device, express a positive attitude in the aspect of the statements about possibilities to obtain interesting information about university in Facebook, to find useful sources for the studies, about academic group communication. This shows that they are important in students' life, FB diversifies study methods, helps to obtain useful information for university studies. Though students spend a lot of time in Facebook, they assert that they are not dependent on using social network, and that this does not have a negative influence neither on their psyche nor the studies.