I decided to communicate this exploration of blogging site WordPress (kind of meta!) via a Piktochart report format. I wanted to think about WordPress as an ICT for youth because my nephew informed me that he uses WordPress in school. I’ll admit I was surprised and very intrigued.
The infographic-like report lends itself to brevity, but I would add that my challenges with WordPress at first were in learning the various options it offers. For example, the first time I used it I needed to produce text within a certain word count, so I typed in Microsoft Word and then pasted into a WordPress post. As soon as I did that, I noticed the word count at the bottom of the screen! Other “challenges” were simply attempts to learn how to edit beyond the text: adding hyperlinks, editing images, figuring out how to caption images, and distinguishing between tags and categories. I also had to look up pingbacks and tagbacks, since I had no idea what they were.
The word cloud included in the report graphic below was created with all of the posts I had posted on WordPress to date.
I decided to delve into Snapchat because it is the app that most strongly confirms that I am no longer “young”. Snapchat was the first version of social media that I just truly did not understand. I couldn’t wrap my head around what it was or why anyone would use it. Now that I understand it a little more, I still don’t plan to use it myself but do see its appeal to others.
My biggest challenge on Snapchat was not knowing how it worked, and not being able to figure it out. I just pressed icons because I didn’t know what else to do. Luckily I didn’t send anything anywhere it shouldn’t go, but I did end up accidentally downloading pictures to my phone a couple of times.
My first snap (is that the noun?) ended up my first accidental download… and I never did figure out how to rotate pictures
I wanted to use Snapchat the way a middle school or high school student might use it. My alma mater is hosting NCAA post-season basketball right now, so I snapped an exciting game. I did a mix of sending posts to a friend and adding posts to my “story”, which I found could then be revisited for 24 hours. Because I didn’t know how else to edit photos and videos (e.g. cropping), this also forced me to play with text and images that can be added to a photo to point out what I wanted to draw attention to.
It wasn’t until I checked out the preprogrammed content that I started to feel some hope in creating a media literacy activity using Snapchat. I was able to follow along with Scott Kelly’s return to earth from the international space station, watch coverage of Flint, Michigan and the Democratic debates, see videos and photos from the Chicago Cubs spring training, and even discover some sort of tattoo convention. I also scanned some of the traditional media channels with content available, like the Wall Street Journal and Buzzfeed (not a pair I imagine together anywhere else).
Buzzfeed had some images that could be saved and snapped — this was the first I saw that seemed kid- or teen-friendly to me
In both the stories and the media content, I see opportunities to teach about critical thinking in media literacy. Ads are sneakily placed within the other content, and some non-ad content is generated by businesses while others are done by individuals. It is all curated by some unknown entity. I envision an activity in which I would ask students to choose an event being covered on Snapchat and analyze who is generating the content, who is choosing what is included, and what might not have been included. I would also want students to think about why those choices might have been made. This is definitely more of a classroom activity than a workshop young people would actually choose to attend, but I think it would help teach important skills through an attractive medium.
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