As the years pass, so do the latest trends in Technology, social media, and what is cool and ultimately hip. Luckily as a teacher, I am able to have a firm grasp on what my kids think is “cool”, and use those mechanisms to create lesson plans that will hopefully engage them.
When I started teaching, I embedded Facebook and Twitter in the classroom because those were the most popular social media applications at the time.
Now, it’s clear that Instagram & Snapchat are the preferred tools of social media as used by teenagers all over the world, and so those continued to be used in my classroom (on paper).
Every year though, there are always small trends that either can grow (or shrink), depending on popularity. At the beginning of the year “TBH Time” was very popular with my students, and so I embedded it directly into my lesson.
That being said, I played around with “Sarahah” today, which is a website where you can leave anonymous comments for your friends. My students respond to these anonymous comments by screenshooting the questions and then responding on Instagram directly. I decided to play around it for a bit on my teacher account, resulting in some of the following responses. The messages in black are my student anonymous comments, and my responses are in different colors with bigger font.
It’s pretty fun, I guess, and so that’s why my students like it. Hopefully these kinds of applications don’t result in bullying, cause I imagine if an insecure kid received some mean anonymous comments on these websites, they would ultimately get sad.
Anyway, the purpose of me using them is of course to embed them into my lesson plan, and so I will have it readily available for them come January in my first lesson on CHINA!
