Greening Your Social Media Fingerprint

First of all, I don’t even know what this title means. Is it even possible to “green” your social media fingerprint? What does “greening” even mean in a digital sense? How can someone make their web presence more positive? How can we learn to benefit from social media in helping us to achieve goals? What’s the point of all this stuff and why do we need it so badly?

These are the kinds of questions that our current HS class, Social Media, is asking. To be quite honest, it’s been a challenge teaching a media class to people who are way savvier than you! However, in an effort make connections between high schoolers and middle schoolers, we have decided to make this a project-based learning opportunity for them to teach the younger generation how to be a little more knowledgeable when using social media.

We enlisted Steve Mcdonald, a GS parent and author/illustrator of the popular Fantastic adult coloring book series, to talk to highschoolers about the importance of social media in self-promotion. Steve uses just about every social media interface there is to get connected, and in doing so, his books have reached Amazon’s top-seller list in a short amount of time. Steve’s theory about social media aligns closely with his art philosophy: that the more you share, the more will come back to you. In an age when “sharing” requires very little thought, Steve emphasizes the importance of maintaining a positive image when you put yourself out there.

This seems like a no-brainer, but it’s not exactly something that someone tells you. Now that I am graduating college soon and heading into a more professional market, I am actually very concerned about what’s out there on the internet about me! I recently spoke with an old friend who had a popular blogspot several years ago with many photos of me in it. Google owns these images, so even if she deleted the posts, the images linger in Google purgatory for who-knows-how-long.

Teenagers actually seem to understand this pretty well. When I lived with the group of boarding students last year, I learned that almost every one of them have phantom/fandom accounts with concealed identity, so they could post whatever they want. But because of the lack of genuine identity, the risk of cyber bullying/harassing is even higher. It doesn’t make it any safer. How can we teach youth to navigate social media waters in a more positive way, without compromising their desire to connect and share?

This project was developed for highschoolers to deliver research-based information to the tweens at GS about their social media impact, in hopes that they will learn about theirs as well:

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR TWEENS

In this Project Based Learning (PBL) task you are challenged to make a presentation for our “Tweens” at Green School (grade 5 and grade 6). The type of presentation you make is entirely up to you and your group. Some suggestions include:

nice simple PowerPoint / Prezi
a video that you could upload to Youtube
an app (?)
a series of Instagram / Snapchat posts etc
or your own choice…

As a starting point, here are some topics that you need include:

What are different Social Media platforms commonly used by teenagers/tweens and what are the differences between them?
What platforms are used by Tweens at Green School e.g snap chat, instagram – you will need to do a survey for this.
What exactly is a digital footprint? How do tweens keep safe on social media? How do they know who they are talking to?
How do marketer’s use these platforms to target tweens?

Instagram

Why is Instagram so popular – how did it start and how is it developing?
What are #hashtags – are they important – are they needed to gain followers?
How do you get people to follow you?
What exactly is Instagram and the different types of accounts people have (such as fandom)
Once you’ve posted on Instagram, who know owns you images?
How can Instagram be used for marketing?
How do you get pople to buy from Instagram and/or generate and income?
What online safety concerns need to be considered when using this platform?

Selling through Facebook

A general overview of Facebook, including
demongraphics of who uses this platform,
difference between social use of FB and building a business page
What is Hootsuite (or other management system) and how it is used to integrate Social Media platforms
A “how to guide” to setting up a business page and how to use user analytics to track they number of visitors to your page
What is an ‘organic’ follower and provide strategies on how to increase this

Setting up a Website

provide information on different website providers such as: weebly, wix, squarespace, moonfruit, jimdo, shopify, wordpress
how to register a domain name
What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org
What does SEO stand for and how to increase this?
What is Google Analytics and how to use this?
In business, what jobs are available in setting up a website (include information from the Bio bus team)
What is a “leading page” and how does it differ from a website?