How are we helping students to navigate social media spaces? #socialLEADia

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I can’t wait to share my passion about the topic of Digital Leadership with the world in the form of my upcoming book, Social LEADia. In anticipation of its release I will be sharing excerpts from it… until which time I can actually hold the book in my hands!

This is one of the stories which I share in the book which reaffirmed for me the need for adults to be in social media spaces together with our students and children.

In the Spring of 2016, I tweeted out the link to a hashtag that kids had created for the Ontario Secondary School Literacy test. #osslt2016  My daughter and I got a real kick out of the very clever posts by students who had just written the test.  Even EQAO (the governing body overseeing the test) responded light-heartedly:

Then a friend of mine pointed out that there was an extremely inappropriate post in the feed. When I looked, I was mortified. Instinctively, I deleted my tweet and reported the tweet as offensive.  This student basically likened writing the test to wanting to be a suicide bomber and included a photo!

Then I took a closer look.  This was just a grade 10 kid trying to be funny and not really understanding the impact.  I looked at his Facebook page (easy enough to find) and realized from the very innocent profile and posts that he had just made a vast error in judgement.

I instinctively contacted him via Twitter.  It could have gone one of two ways: he could have responded maliciously, or he could have realized his error.  Here is how the exchange went:

Me: This is never ever appropriate. Nor is it funny.  And this tweet can come back to haunt you in the future.

Student: (Liked, Retweeted) Thx

Me: You are welcome. Delete it and hopefully no one will see it for now. Good luck!

Student: Kk (Deleted the tweet)

If I wasn’t in this space, I would not have been able to help this student.

This experience has reaffirmed my conviction that we need to spend more time focusing on using social media in positive ways. [bctt tweet=”When we talk about social media, we can’t always use the fear narrative; and we need to be in these spaces to help students navigate the tricky waters!” username=”JCasaTodd”]

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