I am terrified of using social media with my news kids. I have an account set up for them but have yet to relinquish any power to them.
I think my biggest fear is not so much that a reliable student may tweet out something they shouldn't on purpose. I fear that they might do so by accident, or worse, someone else may get ahold of the account and do something malicious.
We had an instance last year were a kid made a bad decision and posted a threat to the school on Instagram from his private account. While he said he really didn't mean it and police eventually cleared him as a threat, the post landed him in some major hot water. The front of our campus became a media circus and our schools name was in national news. Sometimes I think kids don't understand that once something is on the internet, it's out there forever some how someway. We all know that a bad tweet or post will go viral over a positive one.
It's crazy to see how quickly our interactive behavior has changed over the past 15 years with technology. I'm curious to see how it's going change in the next 20.
Victoria Tijerina
Moises E Molina High School
Dallas, Texas
They TOTALLY don't understand that this stuff is forever. A lot of them also don't think before they tweet. But if you hold them to the same standards that you do for writing news (confirm with an authoritative source before tweeting), in my experience, the usually do a good job. The thing that I've had to deal with regarding tweets this year is that they're not being grammatically correct! I'm like, "Guys. I know it takes up a character, but you still need punctuation!!"
ReplyDeleteI had some issues with Twitter last year. While it wasn't on our publication's twitter, some of the people that were on our staff and associated with the twitter account, posted very profain language in their tweets. I had to have a "this is perminent" discussion along with "being a positive representivie of our organization" speech.
ReplyDeleteI have some trepidation as well. Part of it is appropriateness. Another part is how poorly they write. It's not like putting them on social media will immediately make them better. We edit stories as many as five times before publishing them. There is no Twitter editing.
ReplyDeleteJudy Babb
West Mesquite High School
Mesquite, Texas
It's important to model proper social media use. So maybe you tweet out the first few tweets from your publication's new Twitter account and point out the features of a good tweet, which might include things like not editorializing and other principles you already use for your publication. You get them thinking about the fact that every tweet speaks as the voice of your publication, not as the individual who posts it.
ReplyDeleteMy district superintendent is the first person to like and retweet our tweets. My students know this and therefore take it very seriously. They know he sees them, and usually fairly quickly.
Some tweets actually CAN be edited before publishing, at least when you start out. If you're really scared, one idea might be to consider supervising your students tweeting during your class so that you build some trust in them. Another idea would be to have students start out tweeting journalism stuff from their personal accounts and just hashtagging your publication or using the @ symbol to connect it. That way, they are technically speaking for themselves and not the publication. Once you know who you can trust, you can start to turn that power over.
Anyone else have good ideas on this?
Keith Carlson
Naperville Central High School
Naperville, Ill.
Beyond fear of someone doing something stupid, my fear has been quality control. I built in a layer of review so a reporter's tweet about some news event is retweeted from the Cronkite News handle to its thousands of follow only after a producer reviews it. But I'm still afraid since I'm ultimately responsible. It's a brave new world.
ReplyDeleteSteve Elliott
Arizona State University
Phoenix