Thursday, January 11, 2018

Teaching in Social Media Contexts

Social Media is part of life--and a good context for targeting social cognition and narrative language. In general, social media is now one context for us all to be sharing our stories through words and pictures, and also is a way we send messages about ourselves and interact around them. Of course this should be self-monitored; I've shared with my students that I set an intention of at least 2 hours daily in which I don't look at Facebook or Instagram (if you have a goal, you need a measurable action plan). Don't always make it, but I'm trying.

A few contexts in which I have used social media in the last several months:

GCF Learn Free has great simple tutorials on social media outlets. These are good if you are working with individuals who want to begin to use social media as an interactive outlet (learning more about others and making connections).

Related to this, I have been working with a wonderful SLP who uses Instagram photos (mine and many others) to help students "get the story" (situational awareness) implied by a photo, make inferences about relationships depicted in photos, etc. Identifying a few resources you can use with students (screenshot, perhaps, instead of showing them your feed) make for great lessons. These students have also stepped into sharing on Instagram with parental guidance.

There are a number of good resources you can use to make mock text conversations, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat posts. These can be great for presenting narratives and exploring expected and unexpected social media behaviors. Just google and you'll find ones like Status Clone- they produce an image of a fake interaction that you can use in an activity. ClassTools.net also has student-friendly versions of these for you to use for co-creation (see their FakeBook, Twister and SMS Generator).


Here's an example (note: that's not an actual spoiler). 

On iPad, I haven't always found similar tools. Social Dummy performs similar functions but I would never use it in front of students because of its horrible name (Dummy meaning fake, not in the way it might be interpreted)! You can use this app to make teaching images saved to your photos app, however. A recent free tool is Texting Story Chat Maker, which allows you to make a dynamic video of a text conversation unfolding. These are additionally good contexts in which to explore the use of emoji, which are easily accessible on mobile devices.


1 comment:

  1. We are going through a divorce https://onlinedivorcetexas.com/filing-for-divorce-in-Brazos-county/ and her mental stability has become an issue. First there was a rare diagnosis of emotional/mental disorder, then suicidal thoughts, and now I think there was an attempt. The divorce began amicably, but the stress and mental illness ruined it, but in mid-November she told me that I was still her medical representative because she didn't trust her parents to respect her wishes. Last night I was supposed to exchange children, but right before I did I got a call from her mother that she was in the ER and that she wouldn't tell me anything else because it was personal and I had no right to it. Later that evening I called the nurse's office to make sure she was conscious and could make her own decisions. The nurse confirmed that she was conscious and that she would be transferred to an inpatient facility within the hour.

    ReplyDelete

 
.