Teen Troubles with Twitter

Teenagers simply don't get Twitter, and it's a problem. It's a problem for Twitter as a business, but more importantly, it's a problem for society at large.

Teenagers invented a social norm on Twitter called the “follower ratio." They worry about following more people than those who are following them back. It's a sign of status to have more people reading your tweets than tweets you're reading. We see this phenomenon on Instagram and Snapchat too. On Snapchat it's slightly different, it's a fear that a teen sends more snaps than he or she receives.

Because of the social status associated with ratios, teenagers are using Twitter incorrectly and it's stunting their intellectual development. I have written about how teenagers can learn tons of valuable information from Twitter. Twitter is an amazing global network that has an endless flow of information to feed any person’s intellectual passion. But the biggest barrier teenagers face to their ability to learn on Twitter is their reluctance to allow their following ratio to balloon. To do so would deflate their social confidence. As a result, teens only receive updates from their friends and accounts dedicated to reaching teens with quotes, gifs and memes. Twitter becomes an echo chamber of social anxiety and pressure. As a result, they'd much rather converse with multimedia on apps like Snapchat, Instagram, or Vine rather than use Twitter for educational purposes.

The only way for teens to learn on Twitter is for them to enter the global space where they can read, form opinions, curate and share content, and create their original work. If we can't get our teens to add stuff like Vox, Slate, Mashable, the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight to their Twitter feeds, we're robbing them of valuable knowledge that they could gain every time they log in.

In addition to following content, we need to guide our teenagers into academic hashtags, as hashtags can be robust learning spaces. Ironically, most teenagers don't even know how to use a hashtag; I'd estimate one tweet in 100 for teenagers actually goes to a hashtag to backchannel something interesting or meaningful to them (and I'm being generous). Instead, teens use hashtags for a throwaway joke on the back-end of a tweet. That Twitter doesn't sound like much fun. I would leave Twitter for other social media apps too if that's all I saw on it too.

That's where we, as mentors, have to step in. There's information on Twitter. There’s a wealth of fascinating subjects about which one can learn on Twitter. There's a tremendous intellectual world out there that can enhance users’ knowledge, creativity, critical thinking, and technological literacy skills. Twitter is not Snapchat, Instagram, or Vine, which are overwhelmingly filled with silly (and time-consuming) photographs and videos.

Teenagers should use some of their social media time learning, and Twitter should be the vehicle through which they do so. Of course, Twitter, needs young users to love its product. Perhaps if the company and its supports can dispel this silly "ratio" issue with teenagers. It will take effort from both the company and teachers, parents and mentors in communities around the country. If we can help students find the accounts and hashtags that deliver learning, we can help Twitter regain its place in society as a democratic, global learning network that we have loved since its inception in 2006--and that helped usher in important events and conversations like the Arab Spring and the Black Lives Matter movement.

We, as a society, are in a similar place we always are with Teens. Teens get too concerned with their social life and it hinders their intellectual development. We can make a change on social media--a place where teenagers want to spend their time. Let's talk to our teens about Twitter, dispel the notion of a "ratio," tap into the great global network and let the learning begin.

Teen Troubles with Texting

On October 12th, Roni Rabin penned an article for the New York Times called "Compulsive Texting Takes Toll on Teens" that highlighted a study arguing that many teens appear to be addicted to texting. In a study of 8th and 11th graders, the study found that 12% of girls and 3% of boys are "compulsive texters." The article also cited a Pew poll from 2012 that found "the median number of texts sent by teens is 60 a day, with older girls having a median of 100 text messages a day and boys a median of 50."

As someone who works with teens every day, I've pin-pointed a leading cause of this problem: it's group chats. That's where a bulk of the texting occurs between our teenagers. And it's absolutely affecting their sleep, their homework and their emotional well-being.

The other day I inquired informally with a group of 11th grade girls who admit that within the last week they've been a part of between 5-8 group chats. A group chat contains multiple recipients, and in general, the more people involved, the more messages sent and received. I work at a 1:1 school where students send and receive messages from their computer too--often during class. In one day, I had one girl project her phone screen as part of a presentation. The messages app on her phone contained 269 unread text messages. In the subsequent period I helped a 9th grader for five minutes on an essay, she received a text while I was typing on her computer from a friend. I noticed it was the 13th text she had received since she last checked them.

I was stunned; these interactions concern me. I can't imagine having 269 unread texts, that would take a year! I can't imagine having 13 text messages waiting for me on my phone... unless I was in a group-chat with a group of close friends. And that's precisely the problem with our teens.

So how do we deal with a problem that's only increasing in its frequency and its affect on our teenagers? In an age where it's so easy to end up in a group-chat and so hard to get out, and even I struggle to resist the allure of a shiny new text message buzzing my phone? "The study of more than 400 8th graders and 11th graders found that many teenage texters had a lot in common with compulsive gamblers, including losing sleep because of texting, problems cutting back on texting and lying to cover up the amount of time they spent texting."

Schools want to address problems of stress, sleep and attention/retention with school-work. So it's in a schools' best interest to acknowledge this problem and think about how to alleviate the problems associated with high volume texting. Fortunately, most teenagers will admit that texting (and multi-taking in general) hurts their studies. Regardless, there's a learning process that needs to happen.

• In schools we need to discuss social norms and dispel those that invite compulsory texting. 
• We can also help equip students with tools that will help them avoid the allure of getting lost in lengthy, timely text-message and message conversations. 
• Educators need to teach the science behind these issues so our students are aware of how much texting hurts their social-emotional well-being. 
• There's a certain amount of follow-up required by the classroom teachers, the learning center, and the school counselors to remind students of the negatives associated with extensive texting. We need to be vigilant and willing to discuss and discipline in ways that enhance healthy habits. 

Finally, It's imperative that we extend this teaching and learning to our parents as their support in this endeavor is imperative for its success.

There's a Hotkey for That: Teaching Efficiency in Computer Use

Let's face it, adults spend a ridiculous amount of time in front of a computer. To prepare students to take on the "real world," it's imperative that we teach them how to work efficiently on their computers.
The quicker students can locate relevant information, share it, or use it (in whatever manner their profession requires), the more effective they will be in their careers. After all, the sooner employees can create something, the more time they have to polish and refine their work in ways that will help it make an impression on its audience. That will help workers build equity, close deals or earn a promotion.

In order to help my students maneuver efficiently and effectively on the computer, I teach my students the art of hotkeys. I teach them the basics like how to copy, paste, print, find, cut and quit. Then, I add more sophisticated maneuvers like how to shuffle through their open apps, open/close a tab in the internet, employ google search operators, cycle through their open tabs, highlight text, and spotlight search.

macworld

I tell the students that every time they don't have to reach for their mouse, they save time. And time is money. Often, they shrug their shoulders and whine about how silly that is--not the statement time is money, they accept that as gospel--they don't care enough about their mouse use to want to learn new hotkeys. So I pitch the importance of hotkeys in two ways.
First, I use math. I have them consider how much time they spend on a computer each day and how much time they spend maneuvering the mouse. Then I show them how much it saves to know how to hotkey (I'll use an example at the front of them room). Afterwards, I have them calculate how much they save in a sitting, a day, a week, a year, a lifetime of computer use! I say, "What would you do with that time? You'll have it, your neighbor who didn't learn these things won't."
Secondly, I use an example. I ask them to remember the last time an adult asked them for help using technology and to remember how frustrating it is to watch them as they slowly open a browser or an app and take forever to ask their question, that--more often than not--they could have answered themselves if they knew how to use Google. Everyone identifies with this example. Then I tell the students that I experience that everyday when I walk behind them as they use their computers in class!

These examples pique students' interest enough to get them to use more hotkeys. The challenge manifests itself in how to get students to keep using hotkeys. I've done this by including them as "extra-credit" questions on my tests. But, the most effective way to get students to improve their hotkey usage is to create peer-pressure amongst those who are getting it, and those who are still reaching for their mouse. I can create that atmosphere in a classroom, but I wish I could do it across an entire grade or an entire school. Imagine how efficient those students would become in completing homework--especially in schools with 1:1 programs where the hotkeys are the same for each student.

In my opinion, this lesson is even more important for teachers than it is for students. In addition to creating a culture for learning hotkeys and efficiency, teachers themselves can limit their screen time and spend more time teaching, mentoring and building relationships with students--and that's the mark of a great teacher.

Mass Media: Igniting Lifelong Learning

The most important thing my students can take away from my class is a drive to always be learning. I want students to continue to read, analyze, critique, share and create. Today, I had that great moment of satisfaction when I realized I had succeeded in molding lifelong learners.

The class:
This summer, I taught a course called Mass Media in which we critiqued and created the media at a 6-week summer program. We kept a campus Instagram, Twitter and Wordpress. We worked hard to find efficient ways to keep up with the news and find media outlets where students could follow their individual passions. The students thrived. They transformed themselves into avid news consumers: critiquing, analyzing, offering opinions, and questioning the media and the news.

In one project, I asked students to record a podcast for our campus blog with the intention of telling the whole story, in laymen's terms, of something newsworthy that we had been following in our media course. One group chose to record a podcast about the presidential race (wordpress). We sensed an interest in the ASP community and followed up with a "community discussion" at lunch where those community members who were interested arrived to discuss the 2016 race (twitter). They came in large numbers!

The lifelong learning:
Unfortunately, this short program concluded a week ago today, but the learning did not stop. I had set up a GroupMe with my class when we were working on our final video project (lots of moving parts!). That GroupMe has buzzed everyday since, almost always with educational content. On Wednesday, one student posted a quiz that gauged which politician best suits the quiz-taker. When most of us in the group received Bernie Sanders, another student suggested we all travel to Manchester, NH to hear him in a town-hall meeting (it's a New Hampshire summer program). So, not only did my students continue to talk news/politics beyond the program, they organized a get-together at Bernie Sanders's version of our "community discussion." One third of the class attended.

As if attending a political rally wasn't enough, the four students who attended back-channeled it for the rest of us. Below are a few screenshots from their discussion.
One of my students even asked Mr. Sanders a question! Imagine that--a junior in high-school asking Bernie Sanders about his stance on ISIS and Iran-Israel.

The significance:
Obviously, I was overjoyed with my students' academic interest. I felt I had ignited this learning, this civic engagement, and this community where intellectual conversation is the norm, which is the opposite of how teenagers use new media these days.

I had a "If you build it, they will come" moment in which I realized that 16-17 year-old kids really do want to learn. They care about news and politics. And they want to talk to each other about it. They needed a place where they felt comfortable doing just that. And it turned out to be a GroupMe from a class that I thought had already come and gone.

I'll let their messages speak for themselves:

Teaching Digital Citizenship

I was struck by this cartoon recently:

It renewed my commitment to think critically about social media and teach my students to do the same. It's so important that today's students be aware of their digital portfolios so that they don't miss educational and career opportunities, as this cartoon so perfectly illustrates. If students effectively cultivate a digital portfolio that expresses their interests and experience, they won't fall into the trap in the cartoon. On the contrary, opportunities will find them through this portfolio. And, what more could we hope for as educators?

Every educator agrees that an intelligently crafted digital portfolio will serve a student well in college admission, graduate school and beyond. Yet, we're not teaching the art of a digital portfolio in schools. A properly polished digital footprint can show schools and employers a student's interest, initiative, hard-work, community outreach and scholarly contribution. Nevertheless, schools continue to tell students to complete and print rigid assignments rather than publish something in which the student is interested.

Not only do we not teach this skill, even worse, we often discourage this with strict social media policies that keep the student's digital life out-of-sight and out-of-mind of the administrators where online activities become even more likely to damage students' digital image.

For a chance to teach teenagers the art of a digital citizenship and help them construct digital portfolio, I capitalize on a progressive summer program that lets me choose my own curriculum. In my media course, I evaluate students on their use of social media. They're required to pursue interests through twitter, Digg, subscription emails, podcasts, social news sites. They're constantly refining what hits their screen so that they consume informational content about their passions. And, I don't grade submitted essays or projects, I give students pointers on how to improve the essays and projects before they publish them.

I teach branding, asking the students to evaluate the sources they're reading and investigate the digital portfolio of our guest speakers, their peers, and their role models. Then, I help them create their own brand and find ways to consume, curate and then create in ways that will sculpt a small profile, even if it's just what they save/favorite on Twitter, Diigo, Evernote or Google Drive.

It is my hope that by the end of the summer the students 1) learn the power of the internet; 2) use it to ensure that interesting, informational content hits their screens for consumption; 3) learn the tools necessary to efficiently consume, post, send and curate information to sculpt a digital portfolio.

If they master this, doors will open for them; they'll be lightyears ahead of the character in the Dilbert cartoon--avoiding an internet presence that eliminates them from contention while gaining a digital profile that will attract academic and employment opportunities.

GenZ and Privacy

Apple

Recently, the technology coordinator and I tried to teach a group of 25 seniors about privacy settings. These are our "Peer Leaders" who were learning this to pass the information along to their freshmen advisees. The school is concerned with predatory accounts friending, following and otherwise infiltrating our students' social networks for unethical, immoral reasons. Though these students are 18 years old, and supposedly "digital natives", it's safe to say they had NO idea how to control their privacy settings and NO idea how much of their data was being mined.

Perhaps Danah Boyd put it best when she wrote that today's media is "public by default, private when necessary." It's in these applications'/websites' best interest to keep profiles open to foster connections and thus mine more data in order to create future revenue. Therefor, it's imperative that we force our students think critically and carefully about which permissions they give to which applications and websites... and why.

Problem:
The peer leaders in this classroom laughed uncomfortably when they uncovered the sheer volume of apps to which they had given access to their location--not to mention the amount of apps to which they had given access to their photographs.

They admitted that they often accepted "friends" whom they had never met in person. Many of them have over 1,000 friends on Facebook, and had never gone back through to remove friends--not to mention remove old posts. And that's just one of their social networks where they've over-connected and over-shared. And, this all permanent, a fact that millennials often forget (including snapchat--just check their terms of service).

Solution:
To address this deficiency, we talked about how to revoke access to applications and websites that were mining their data. We even encouraged them to limit their friend lists and interactions on social networks. Then, we empowered them with a few tools to fight back--ways to track links and ways to pull a predator's IP address if they felt threatened.

Though I felt good about this lesson, I felt far more depressed about how oblivious students were to the inner-workings of social networks and applications.

Unfortunately, we often only teach these lessons after students have already made a mistake or struggled through an online interaction. And, in what capacity are schools going to teach these lessons? We had to hold our seniors out of a meeting period in order to find the time to teach this. I can't think of anything more important to teach the supposed "digital natives."

Fortunately for me, I teach a summer class called Mass Media where this is part of my curriculum. And, I see the same problems with those millennials. The way I've taught this in the past and will again in the future is by teaching data mining. Putting a face on which businesses are mining their data and how they're using this data often spooks them. I hope that my students will tighten up their privacy settings, think twice about posting something publicly, and reject application permissions and  "friend" requests. If this lesson really hits, the students will go back through all their old posts and permissions and start cleaning up their digital resumes. After all, we're only moving towards more online interactions and, paper resumes will be outdated by the time these teens apply for jobs.

Harnessing the Popularity of Instagram in History Class

Last week, I asked students to take to Instagram to demonstrate their understanding of the Great Depression. When they arrived in class on the due date, students opened their homework and walked around the room to look at their classmates’ assignments. They scrutinized each other’s Great Depression Instagram Projects wondering the significance of a number, date, account name or hashtag. I told my students that they’d vote for the most creative project to earn the coveted title “best-in-class” and a spot on the bulletin board in the back of the classroom.

This project transcended multiple disciplines forcing students to creatively answer the prompt applying a variety of knowledge and skills. They learned a new piece of technology, they studied the Great Depression, and they had to tell a story with a platform they use daily.

With a photoshop Instagram template I received from the founder of histograms.com, students could manipulate all aspects of an Instagram post. I taught them photoshop so they could build this project. Then, I asked them to tell a story. They were asked to envision themselves in the 1930s and detail their own troubles, or to make up their own character or scene that proved they understood the challenges facing people during the Great Depression. Students could use an original image (like the one below), they could take one offline, or they could create their own meme!

My students proved their understanding of the Depression by including the date, a location, a career that a character held, the troubles he/she faced, and the social and political events that we covered in class. Students referenced: The Dust Bowl, The Grapes of Wrath, Hoover and Rugged Individualism, FDR and the New Deal, the Bonus Army, Hoovervilles, bread lines, you name it.

While students manipulated photoshop displaying their knowledge of the history, they also exercised their creativity in making their post tell a story. Each project had to have a protagonist, conflict and resolution, or lack thereof (often lackthereof given the unit).

Finally, but most importantly, I built creativity into the rubric for the project. Essentially, I told my students that the ability to think creatively will be helpful throughout their lives.

Because students had to present these projects to their fellow classmates, they felt social pressure to avoid taking the easy route--for instance, pasting Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother into the template with a hashtag about the dust bowl. Instead, students compared and contrasted images, they produced multiple images, they took original photos, and they added onto the template in creative ways to include more information or more images.

When students finished perusing their classmates work, they voted on the best one. This exercise reinforced my push for students to be creative, try something new, build, share and critique. The three winners are going up on the back wall to inspire others when I get to introduce the next class project.

I Teach History Visually

Inherently, teaching history requires a certain amount of information delivery; but every students has his or her own preferred method to receive, recall and interact with that information. Some of my students can pick it all up just by reading the textbook closely (though textbook reading is their least favorite activity); others can listen to a lecture, jot a few notes and later recall it come test time; others still, benefit more when they see visuals attached to a lecture or presentation. In trying to provide the best instruction to all of the above types of learners, I’ve recently reached out to the visual learners in my classroom and it has boosted engagement and retention.

Lenin vs. Stalin in politics and economics

Most teachers jot a few notes on the whiteboard under each topic they want students to learn. Understanding that sites like wikipedia and quizlet easily cover and compile notes on these topics, I’ve moved in a new direction. I reduce the amount of words I write on the whiteboard and instead draw pictures (no matter what I’m teaching). The hope is that these lessons will reach my visual learners for retention and better recollection on unit examinations.

I find that the communal drawing fascinates students who enjoy critiquing and advising my masterpieces

an original cartoon of Andrew Johnson's impeachment

The first great result I discovered in trying visual lessons was unexpected. Because I wasn’t writing the words they needed to know, students had to put these concepts in their own words independently for their notes. Fortunately, I work in a 1:1 classroom so during my drawing, students googled words that they needed to define or events that they needed to understand. Precisely because I wasn’t feeding them the words/notes they needed to have, students began looking up the things I wanted them to learn in the way they look up information outside of class--through Google. This increased their level of engagement with the material. Students used their familiar search engines differently, they took notes differently, and they interacted differently with this unique lesson.

These lessons certainly helped students focus better. They stayed on task on their computer screens. Some googled the information, others wrote what I was saying down, and others pushed their computers out of the way and started drawing their own copy of my image in notebooks. One savvy student drew her own version on a computer application. I posted it, and a photo that I took of the whiteboard, to the class Moodle page hoping it would jog students’ memories before the test. It did.

one student used skitch to record my lesson

Finally, this lesson also forced students to think creatively. From an image, they had to figure out the background information, the major players, and how my own opinion about the history played into my drawing. Simultaneously, students loved questioning why I made the decisions I did. Now that I’ve run this lesson a number of times, I can turn over the teaching to my students. I can now ask them to create a visual to teach their classmates about an historical event, person, or primary source. This assignment requires students to think outside the box, take a risk (especially in sharing their "art"), and take ownership of the teaching and learning.

Holiday Newsletters: Facilitating Learning through Winter Break

On December 19th, my students departed for a two-week vacation, and I was terrified to think they wouldn’t be reading and learning while away from school. The lure of Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine draws students away from the New York Times, The WSJ, NPR, and any other vehicles for learning that a teacher might endorse. This past break, in order to keep them reading and informed while away from school, I sent my students three “holiday newsletters.” These newsletters contained news and opinion pieces on current events in different media formats.

One of my hesitations in crafting these newsletters is that I’m not a professional editor; but, through my own social media I’ve curated quite a list of feeds that keep me up-to-date with the news. I’ve tried to teach students this skill so they can be their own editors, but alas, most teenagers aren’t interested. So instead, through my newsletters, I made it as easy as possible for my students to keep up with current events, hoping to catch a handful of them bored over their lengthy break.

It worked wonders. I didn’t reach nearly every student, but I did reach some. And that’s what matters. A handful of my students took time out of their vacation to see what’s going on outside their bubble. They had a chance to be informed citizens, to choose something that interested them and keep learning

When my students returned from break, we held intellectual discussions that helped them keep up with news from over the break. In some classes these discussions encouraged more of them to go back and read the newsletters; I even had a student who went back to a previous newsletter to hear a 2005 Kenyon graduation talk by David Foster Wallace. She emailed me a week later:

Hopefully, the “holiday newsletters” encouraged the students to consume and to share more academic content.

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

Declaration + Drive = Deeper Learning

Whenever I teach the Declaration of Independence, students always think they already know all about it. Most know Jefferson wrote it, and most know it starts out with "When in the course of human events... all men are created equal" yadda yadda yadda. But, for the past few years, I've forced students to read and react to more of it, and I'm confident they've reached a better understanding of this seminal work in American History.

After sharing the Declaration on Google Drive, I have students pair up and read a section of the grievances underneath the famous, "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness." In this section of the document, students I have students connect the grievances outlined with the events and policies of the pre-revolutionary period in the colonies. Check out this screen shot:

Not only did the students learn just what drove our founding father to commit treason by signing this document, but the lesson also served as a review of our previous lessons. Students had to revisit the Quartering Act, the Declaratory Act, and the Intolerable Acts, to name a few. Therefore, this primary source served as a direct connection between what we were studying and how that drove the decisions of the founding fathers at the time. And for that alone, this lesson delivered deeper understanding of the period and the document.

Perhaps my favorite part of this year's lesson is that one of the students in my class muttered to his partner, "man the founding fathers were a bunch of whining babies." Hopefully that kind of interest continues when we address other primary sources this year.

Teaching Social Media to Teens

Student advertisement for the class blog

This summer, for the first time in my educational career, I had the opportunity to teach social media to high school students. I’ve written about this before and I’ve been itching to teach students the best way for them to use social media to help prepare them for their professional lives while they’re still in school. I believe strongly in the importance of a digital footprint, and I don’t think teenagers are being taught how to properly post, like, retweet, comment, hashtag and so on. This summer, I changed that with 12 smart, rising 12th graders from across the state of New Hampshire at the Advanced Studies Program at St Paul’s School.

The course provided a classic liberal arts education; students critiqued the media, and students created the media. They discovered and evaluated their own relationship with the media through discussion, and they learned new styles of producing the media through many mediums: writing, podcasting and shooting video. Most importantly, I had them posting their work on the web for all to see; we had a Twitter, an Instagram and a blogger where we kept the campus news.

But, what I’d like to write about in this post is my personal effort to siphon the mindless noise out of their social media pages and get them consuming informational content in their feeds. If we can teach students to consume better content AND we allow them to create as well as critique the media, it has the best chance of having a lasting effect on their intellectual and professional growth.

In consuming, creating and critiquing the media, I intended to plant a seed that will continue to grow as students specify their interests. At least for now, they can identify some good news sources and can use some new applications (Drive, Blogger, Twitter, Instagram, iMovie, Garageband). But if I was successful, they’ll continue using their favorite social media apps to consume media that helps them become informed, global citizens. And in an ideal world, my students would move that informational content and thereby convince other teens to use social media more responsibly; then, maybe, just maybe we can reduce the colossal time-waste that is teenage social media consumption, and instead help them learn about their interests so they are more prepared for college and the real world.

I started the course by asking students to create a twitter and follow each other, and me. Then I had them follow a handful of about 35 accounts that I added to our class account. I asked them to follow news outlets like NYTimes, Washington Post, Brain Pickings, Mashable, the Colbert Report, Open Culture and various guest speakers who taught during our five-week program. These represented the accounts from which we’d consume content. Each day when students arrived for class, they were given fifteen minutes to read the news from their twitter feed.

Even if students had just added these to the feeds that they read each morning, I would still consider this a victory for their education and growth; but, on each Saturday class, we held a “Social Media Marketplace” where students sought quality feeds based on their interests that were outside of the things we were reading/watching in a media class. Some students chose to pick up design feeds like Uncrate, GOOD, Explore and Fast Company while others picked up environmental feeds like, the National Geographic, Huffington Post Green, Climate Desk, Eco Tech Daily, and Green Energy News. Simultaneously, I also asked them to prune their feeds of accounts that don't deliver useful information. Most importantly, students engaged in this process together, so what they added and subtracted could benefit others. This ensured that what students saw and read could be seen by another student, opening up dialogue and increasing understanding. We also had a class hashtag where students could tweet articles to the rest of us so that we could learn and discuss. This curricular agency paid huge dividends in the learning process.

For five weeks students were aware and critical of what was going on in the world, thanks to their social media pages. At the same time, they wrote their own articles for our blog to try to inform our school community. My students felt that following the news was hard for teens because it’s difficult to understand the background behind big stories if you read just one article. My effort to fix this was to open up their feeds to more and better information (a site like Vox built its whole mission around giving context behind the news). But I also created a project to help the students solve this issue themselves. I divided them into groups to record podcasts that explain the whole story behind a current event. This way, teenagers in the community could learn the background behind the stories and then keep up with it. My students covered Israel-Palestine, Hobby Lobby, Ukraine and Boko Haram. At the culmination of that unit, our Social Media Marketplace on Saturday focused on podcasts that the students should follow.

Perhaps the most encouraging development with our production and consumption of social media is that students wanted our blog to move to a wider audience. Halfway through the program, when I interviewed each student, a majority of my class asked me to open the target audience of our blog to outside the Advanced Studies Program. They wanted to write about the things they had become interested in during our classes and discussions; and, they wanted a greater diversity of content on the blog for others to learn as well. The rebranding of our blog proved that students believed strongly in the digital footprint we were creating and they wanted to get better!

Why We Need to Teach Social Media in Our Schools

Parents and teachers are scared of social media, in part because students sometimes use it in mindless and daunting ways, but also because many parents and teachers don’t understand its possible benefits. No one is teaching this generation of students how to use social media productively to nurture intellectual passions and develop marketable skills. Students are not following accounts that provide information and inspiration. Instead, they take photos of their lunch, try to acquire more “likes” than their friends, and try to embarrass one another with less than flattering photographs.

Educators need to begin to help students build their own responsible digital-profiles and use social media for academic enrichment. What crosses students’ desks, or appears in their feeds, should be substantive and based on their interests. The best way to create a culture of curiosity, exploration and sharing is to teach students how to manage content and conversations online. Students who are interested in business, for example, should be guided to the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Financial Times or The Economist. Students who are interested in psychology should be guided to Psychology Today, Pyschobest and Psych Central. Unfortunately, there’s little time for this guidance in our crowded curriculum and, on their own, students can’t be bothered to seek out educational content in place of their social updates. Yet, this content, ideally grounded in their curiosity, could form the basis of a lifelong intellectual passion or even a possible career.

Educational institutions equip their graduates with the research skills, organizational skills, analytical skills and verbal/writing skills to succeed in the workforce. This has been true for decades. But, thanks in large part to technology, the professional landscape has changed so much that it’s hard for students to figure out in which industry, or for which cause, they would like to employ their acquired skills. As it is, most universities do not invite academic specialization until students are in their final two years. The best way to help students with these issues is through social media.

Social media provides a forum through which students can learn about and engage with industries and professionals that represent a wide-range of intellectual opportunities. The forum invites dialogue and content updates in real-time. We need to teach students what to read and watch in order to develop expertise in a given field. And, we need to teach them how to post, like, comment, inquire, reply, and connect in ways that benefit students and their chosen industries. As educators, we know that the best learning is a product of guidance, encouragement, and debate. If there’s a student who is interested in technology, I want to help him read, analyze, and debate content from Mashable, Gizmodo, CNET, WSJD, and Wired, to name a few. Or if a student wants to save the planet, I’d like to point him toward Greenpeace, Climate Desk, and Green Living.

Upon graduating from college in 2009, my friends and I were asked by executives to use the academic skills acquired in college to curate and deliver information that could help organizations advance their brand, cause or idea. Frequently, we were also asked to combine these skills with our knowledge of social media in order to reach new audiences. Independently, we realized that our ability to flourish in our young careers depended upon our connection with industry leaders, consumption of up-to-date content, and creation of digital profiles, whether for a company or as individuals. Far more effective than a paper resume, strong digital-profiles are the best way for young professionals to progress in a given field, and even move between fields.

None of our professors ever advised us to explore social media, nor did they talk about the changing economy that we would inherit as young professionals. Today, economists keep referencing the “startup economy” but schools aren’t teaching students how to navigate this landscape. Educators should guide students not only in their consumption of information, but to internships and other experiential opportunities to build a resume in a given industry. Ideally, social science teachers should encourage their students to follow Re/code, Techstars, or Kickstarter so that they can feel empowered to start their own business.

Ironically, if schools taught a class on social media, and that was the only class a student took, some could still find employment monitoring feeds, creating snapchats, producing vines, or curating Pinterest for a business. Businesses will pay for these services. Young graduates, who have learned to harness the power of social media, update pages, curate a digital footprint and forge connections to make themselves knowledgeable in their content area and valuable to their employers.

Fulfillment comes from exploring a wide variety of interests and developing our understanding of them all. It’s time to help our students pursue interests outside of their core academic courses. It’s time to help them to customize their own learning, and engage in professional dialogue in an appropriate manner. With our guidance, students will feel prepared and confident navigating the professional landscape they inherit. Social media has disrupted society; the learning environment is changing, the professional environment is changing, and schools should be changing with them. If we want our students to be curious, informed and competitive, we need to acknowledge, appreciate, and, finally, teach social media

A version of this post was published by NAIS

Social Media 101: My Presentation to the Parents’ Association

source

Last week, I was given the opportunity to teach a lesson called “Social Media; What’s in, what’s out and what’s trouble?” to any middle or high school parent who was interested. About thirty parents arrived, a few with notebooks in hand, to hear what I had to to say. I started by admitting I am no expert on Social Media. But, I do have a different perspective on how their children use social media since I’m around them every day in so many different capacities--as teacher, coach, advisor, mentor, and friend. I decided to start my presentation by scaring the parents, then presenting my more optimistic thesis about teen social media use: that with the right mentoring, they can harness its potential to pursue passions and express creativity.

The Apps:
I felt obligated to start with Facebook largely because the adults in the room to whom I was speaking all admitted that they had facebook accounts. I moved away from it quickly, though, because teenagers are doing the same. Next, I moved to Tumblr and Twitter to give the parents a landscape of the social media their children use. I also used these apps to highlight how our economy values social media start-ups: Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr, and Facebook paid $750 for Instagram. I showed a video, explaining how much a stranger can learn about someone by searching nearby social media pages, that understandably terrified a lot of the parents in the room.

Relentless, I then moved to the apps that I red-flagged for the parents: Snapchat, Vine, Tinder, and Chatroulette. Snapchat, an app that turned down $3 billion from Facebook, moves 350 million photos a day. I told the parents a story of a sophomore girl who, upon checking her snap profile, realized she had sent 28,000 snaps since she downloaded the app the previous year. I used my math skills to highlight that she sent, on average, over 50 snaps a day! Naturally, the parents hoped that it wasn’t their kid, so I shared the story of a junior girl with 33,000+ snaps sent since she created her profile. The scary thing about “snaps,” of course, is that they don’t actually disappear, as teeangers think they do. Others take screenshots, and Snapchat holds them in a database. After my Snapchat warning, I told the parents about the meme “do it for the vine,” and implored them to discourage their teens from doing something stupid or dangerous for internet fame.

Finally, when I got to Tinder and Chatroulette, the parents started to speak up--even though I had said I would take questions at the end. Fortunately, I don’t think a lot of our students are on these apps, but they exist, and they’re popular. Tinder is a “dating” site based on proximity that allows users who have mutually “liked” one another’s photo to chat and perhaps meet up! In February, Tinder boasted 750 million swipes a day. And, Chatroulette is one of the scarier apps--through Chatroulette, users can connect to anyone with a webcam anywhere in the world with just a click.

The Argument:
Despite all the negatives associated with these apps, and the overarching disconnect teenagers are facing, I tried to spin this talk optimistically. Acknowledging the negative, I urged parents to speak to their kids about this stuff. I argued that students are sacrificing their physical relationships, basing their self-worth on the number of “likes” on their online profile, and that’s not okay. I told the parents a story of a 16 year-old girl who I caught during check-in at 10:15 putting make-up on so she could go take a “selfie” with another student. The next day I asked her why she was on her phone while I was talking, and her answer was that she was checking how many “likes” she received. Unfortunately, this happens when students don’t find anything else to post about, and therefore put themselves out there for the digital world. We, parents and teachers, need to be on the look-out for this behavior and find other ways to help our kids evaluate their self-worth--hopefully based on interest.

Again, in an effort to emphasize the positive, I looped back around to an opening statement I made about the Arab Spring revolutions and their dependence on social media. I pointed out that social media has potentially immense value. Though I argued students were stuck using apps for “social” updates, I hypothesized that they could be using them for information updates. In order to get students from “social” to “informational,” I hope to help them explore their passions on social media. I talked about Tumblr blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages that students could “like” to get updates that help them become deeper thinkers, informed citizens, and inspired creators. Unfortunately, our students struggle to get outside their social circles and into the part of social media that benefits the 21st century student. Social media has beneficial, informational uses, including opportunities for personal and professional development and networking, a platform from which to ignite regime change, a source for promoting a worthy cause, and an outlet to help a boy fighting cancer become batman for a day. I’m convinced my students can be inspired by these uses, and though I didn’t say it explicitly, I think schools have to be teaching this stuff. Fortunately, I didn't have to say it: The parents did in their follow-up questions, which turned out to be more of a discussion and less of a Q&A. I couldn’t have been happier; it was a great first step!

Forming a Foundation for Teaching Fascism

In the US History curriculum, students struggle to understand the finer points of fascism and how it led the globe into a second world war. I’ve tried many ways to help them consider this, but I think I’ve found the answer. Last week, I generated a solid lesson outlining the details of this complex governmental institution, by first having students evaluate the US Government’s relationship with the tell-tale signs of fascism. I printed and distributed the goals of fascism from this great article at Addicting Info called “You Might be A fascist If...” Each student had one quotation that defined fascism. They shared their detail and then debated whether the US has been guilty of said violation.  

For example: 

“You are obsessed with security, and war. You feed this obsession by spending trillions of dollars building up a large military force and are willing to sacrifice domestic programs your people count on to keep your military huge. You start unnecessary and costly wars and you are paranoid of other nations.”

When forced to first wrestle with America’s fascist tendencies, students better connected the dots as to how the worldwide depression led to a rise in the fascist governments in Italy, Germany, and Japan--to name a few. Since we had just covered WWI and the Depression, students knew how citizens around the globe struggled. And, they admitted that people could be coerced by their government.

Clearly, some cases compared closely to the United States while other were more of a stretch, but inevitably students recognized that even the US contains elements of what most would define as fascism. This lesson generated lots of questions about international policy and governmental corruption. From this discussion, I carefully segued into ways in which Mussolini and Hitler concentrated power in the state apparatus--for fascism.

And one more quotation for good measure:  
“You are obsessed with national power and pride and believe your country doesn’t have to follow the rules and shouldn’t ever apologize for doing things that are wrong.”

Bringing Model UN into the History Classroom

Truly understanding why the globe launched itself into a second world war in just two decades is challenging. Textbooks try to highlight a few terms/events to sum up a very complicated international political economy. In the textbook our school uses, Alan Brinkley’s Unfinished Nation, he highlights: Dawes Plan, Kellogg-Briand Pact, Lebensraum, the Neutrality Acts, Rome-Berlin Axis, Anschluss and the Munich Conference. Obviously, reading the chapter is not enough, which is why students took their seats in my classroom the next day. Only--this time, it wasn’t a classroom, it was an international diplomatic table of countries involved in the lead-up to WWII

Procedure:

First, I divided the students up into the different countries including a League of Nations. Then, I had them take on the issues. Naturally, I didn’t like Brinkley’s terms, so I made my own list. At the beginning of class, students quietly worked with their fellow ambassador (if they had one) to write a press release about each event and thus play model UN without being in model UN!

After they wrote their press releases, I let them debate the issues. This was a lot more challenging. When I do this lesson again next time, I’m going to give them their countries before hand so they can do some background research to better defend their positions with proof.

Results:

Students certainly better understood the lead up to WWII. But, this lesson also taught students what it’s like being a politician/diplomat/ambassador. They also played around with writing a formal press release. When some countries/students had more formal, articulate press-releases, the other groups tried to keep up. In the end, they were all really good!

After the classed hummed along for a while,I figure I would detail the opening movements of the war in Europe. But, I didn’t get far. When we started talking about the Munich Agreement and Germany taking over the Sudetenland, one of my students drew a parallel to the current situation going on in the Ukraine--the exact parallel former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton made two days later--I might add. Clearly they were thinking like diplomats!

Then I embarked on a sweet tangent about how history relates to current events. And on that note, I’m going to read the news.

Great Depression Storytelling

As a history teacher, I find one of the best ways to get engagement and retention is to give students a role to play in class. One way to do this is to set up a hypothetical situation where students are actors in a story from history. During the Great Depression (or any depression/panic for that matter), I make each student a part of society and force them to contemplate the decisions that led the country into depression.

While the best part of the lesson is student engagement, it’s also a great teaching tool for empathy. Students have to grapple with how people lose their jobs, but also about how businesses--usually banks--make bad decisions that lead to financial catastrophe.

Finally, it provides a nice framework to refer to when you discuss subsequent recessions. Or, when you’re trying to review the material and you can refer to the exact student who was the banker who had to send his/her hired thugs to call-in a loan; it helps to jog students’ memories.

Here’s the set up for my Great Depression unit. Feel free to ask questions in the comments section if you don’t understand how it works.

Characters:

Banker 1

• invests in the market responsibly
• pays back debts

Banker 2

• bad investments
• bad loans
• bankrupt when panic sets in

Business person

• needed a loan to expand his business
• they take on an employee (character below)
• when times get tough the employee gets fired
• people (including former employee) now can’t afford goods and price falls
• tariff rates also lead to
• price drops and deflation occurs

Employee

• has a job until the employers loan gets called in
• then fired and unemployed--with no way to get a loan

Citizen 1

• can buy on margin
• can invest in one bank
• can run on the panics when panic sets in

Citizen 2

• Just took out a loan to buy a house (or expand a small business)
• bank comes knocking

Farmer 1

• takes out a loan
• prices fall

Farmer 2

• drought/dust bowl and displacement

The Government (usually teacher)

• invests heavily to win WWI
• pulls back on investment
• increases interest rates (Fed)
• increases tariff (Congress)
• Hoover’s government vs. FDR