Backchannel for School Culture: @MKAScreenz, A Delightful Disruption

@MKAScreenz's most popular tweet

This past summer, I taught a class on Twitter, which convinced me that this is a great vehicle to ignite curiosity and develop lifelong learners. In trying to take advantage of that space again, I created an account to promote community events and foster positive dialogue within our community. Truthfully, I wanted to get students away from Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine and back on Twitter. Though I think all social media sites can be a colossal waste of time, Twitter can facilitate passion-based learning in a way that school just can’t (provided students follow the right accounts, which I take on in this website). So I set out to teach students how to constructively use this space. Many students used their social media as a means to interact with others by venting and criticizing individuals and events (away from parents and teachers); I hoped to help them rethink that approach.

I created the account @MKAScreenz after the Dean of Student Life asked me to produce the content on the LCD announcement screens around campus. Instead of just posting the school schedule, I include news updates, promote campus events with hashtags, and slide in the occasional comedic gif to keep the students engaged. The twitter feed has allowed me to connect with the students about campus life. It has given them agency in what they see on the screens, as they email me and tweet me about content. And students I’ve never even met have started to seek me out about ideas that need promoting. It’s fun.

More importantly, @MKAScreenz has had an impact on community involvement, particularly with respect to the “house system” at MKA. A number of years ago, MKA created a house system--much like Harry Potter--as a way to improve campus life. Each house competes in sports, art, music and other activities and points are awarded based on excellence and spirit. In the bio, @MKAScreenz refers to itself as a “house sports enthusiast.” After convincing the school newspaper’s web editor to join me on twitter, the two of us started documenting campus events. Students noticed; I reached 126 followers in two weeks!

@MKAscreenz energized the school. At our house dodgeball competition, MKAScreenz’s tweets garnered 54 favorites and 11 retweets. At another house competition called “minute-to-win-it”, @MKAScreenz received 38 likes for its coverage. Finally, when a visiting author arrived to speak about his book, students clicked favorite 38 times and retweet 8 times on my live-tweets of his lecture which is incredible. Students were positive and engaged, and wanted to share with their friends the contents of a mandatory lecture!

The success of some of these posts spawned spin-offs. I welcomed it. First, the four houses in the house system joined twitter--@HouseStrong, @MonjoKongs, @WaldenFlames and @BradleyBearsxox. In addition to those four accounts, students created @MKAGossipGirl, @MKAProbz, @OverheardatMKA, @MKAlbrary, to name a few. I know the students behind some of these, and others I don’t know. And I that’s okay, I respect their initiative and I’m sure they’ll learn many lessons trying to brand a new campus online personality. With all the interest, community involvement is through the roof at MKA! And, slowly, I’ve been able to turn over the work to the students through hashtags. Though we call today’s students “digital natives” I was shocked to learn most didn’t know the power of hashtags. On Halloween, they learned: We all used #MKAhallo, and together we curated a great snapshot of all the great costumes.

@MKAGossipGirl is one of the most creative spin-offs

Essentially I started a course in brand management, social media, creativity, entrepreneurship, collaboration, and school spirit. I’m thrilled with the results. Students feel more connected to the school community than ever before. Followers connect and contribute to the larger campus community in a positive, meaningful war.

Igniting this forum was half the journey toward my goal of familiarizing students with the benefits of twitter so that they can use it to further their education. I wrote previously about why we should teach Social Media and also how I taught it this past summer. @MKAscreenz has given me the credibility to further pursue this goal at MKA.

Engagement in Student Government: #ASPElect

This summer at St. Paul’s Advanced Studies Program, I taught a course on mass media that sought to teach students how to critique the media and create media. One of our projects was a collaboration with a colleague’s government class to help them host a campus election. My students covered the candidates in our campus blog, they helped the candidates shoot campaign ads, and they live-tweeted the presidential debate in anticipation of the campus-wide vote. This activity fit my goals perfectly—students critiqued candidates’ positions, created partisan and independent media, and voted as informed members of the community—most importantly, they cared; they engaged with local politics, something unheard of among 21st century teens.

In this project I discovered that when given a voice, students owned it: asking astute questions, disagreeing (sometimes vociferously and publicly) with candidates, and connecting with others around the community. This engagement, which began between the students of the media and government classes, blossomed across the community. My students learned iMovie and Garageband while the government students learned how to run a campaign, but students across the entire community collaborated, critiqued and created—exactly what I hoped for teaching a media class.

The students’ agency/ownership of the project manifested itself best in the presidential debate, which was under the lights in the campus auditorium. My colleagues were forward-thinking enough to allow a twitter hashtag to run on the projector on stage while the candidates answered questions down front. As a result, many of the questions asked of the candidates originated in the seats in front of them! This agency piqued the interest of the entire ASP community.

The Debate

Once engaged, students voiced their opinions through twitter, but also in whispers to their neighbors, and the next day, much more vocally at “fruit break.” When the students felt like they stumped the candidates with questions, they got into it and in turn got something out of it. They felt that they were contributing to something important even though the stakes were as low as student governance of a five-week summer enrichment program.

Debating the issues at Fruit Break

The activity encouraged students to use their social capital, and their social media pages for good. Some of my tweets on the evening of the debate garnered multiple retweets and favorites. This means that a number of students were willing to broadcast the fact that they were participating in #ASPElect to all of their friends back at home (during summer vacation!). Students lent legitimacy to student government (something that has traditionally been a popularity contest) and hopefully more broadly, to civic engagement as a whole

I learned two crucial lessons from this activity. First, we need to allow our students to have more agency in school activities. They need to be able to send out their own messages, answer each other’s questions, and sculpt their own campus (and online) profiles. Secondly, engagement comes from school events that students are interested in, but the events deliver more learning when we can ensure that they’re engaging enough to appear in students’ social feeds.

I hope that students enjoyed this activity enough to keep it going when they returned to their high schools for their senior year. It took creativity, collaboration and innovation—all 21st century skills—to succeed in all facets of this project. If students engage with these processes at their own schools--or even better, politically and journalistically on a local or national level--I’d be thrilled. Certainly at this program, students seized the opportunity we provided. They made it entertaining, informational and rewarding. As a result, this project helped build skills, build community, and build relationships that will go beyond the walls of our summer school