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Social Media & Digital Tools Lesson Plans

ASNE Lesson Plan for Social Media and Digital Tools

Social Media & Digital Tools Lesson
Social Media & Digital Tools PowerPoint
Social Media Organizer

Other Lessons

Taking Ownership: Students Take On Social Networking
Use basic journalism concepts toward creating student Blogs for each journalism course.

Articles and Tips

Examples
Look for differences among one journalist’s various social media accounts to better understand what each social media platform is for.

Social media guidelines

Social Media Sites

Blogging
Blogging is an important way for budding journalists to make their voice heard. The more you write, the better, and blogging encourages you to do just that.

  • Blogger is a great resource for beginning journalists who are starting their first blog. It’s easy to use, so set up your own account and blog title, and start writing!
  • Weebly allows teachers to create their own blog for a class and fosters interaction between teacher and students through blogs. Students maintain their own blog while commenting on their teacher’s and each other’s. Weebly inculcates regular usage of social media that journalists have become so dependent on and creates familiarity with blogging, another important journalistic tool.
  • Tumblr and WordPress are slightly more difficult to use, but they have larger readership. Tumblr focuses primarily on image sharing, but there is a place for text on Tumblr as well. WordPress is a content management system that allows its users to create a website from top to bottom, as opposed to a simple blog. But WordPress does have a blog option, as well.

What kind of blogging site you choose depends on what you plan to write about and who you would like to read your writing.

Facebook

  • Facebook has over one billion active users, making it perhaps the only way to give a billion people access to information at once. The Facebook app allows you to access your account from your smartphone or tablet when you’re covering a story on the go.

Google+

  • Google+ is a social networking site that allows users to create an extensive profile, similar to that of LinkedIn but with more pictures, and different “circles” of friends and connections. With Google+, you can share different information with the groups that you think would be most interested. Journalists generally use Google+ to share and receive information and to add another layer of to their personal web presence.

Instagram

  • Instagram helps photographers of any skill level turn turn their pictures into works of art. A good way to think of Instagram is if Facebook only had pictures. To that end, a lot of publications use Instagram accounts to post cool pictures and videos their readers might find Instagram. It’s a great way to learn how to use social media to interact with your audience.

LinkedIn

  • LinkedIn is a social networking site that users take advantage of for primarily career purposes. You can create a profile and “connect” with people with similar interests or from previous work experience. Beyond professional networking, journalists can also use LinkedIn for reporting. Searching by profession is an excellent way to find an expert in a field or an employee of a specific organization, and status updates help formulate story ideas and angles.

Pinterest

  • News publications use Pinterest as a way to promote and share entertainment and lifestyle stories. Pinterest uses images for the most part, which allows news organizations to post original photos, recipes and other information that is relevant to the typical Pinterest user. They will then provide links to the story on their website that correspond with the supplemental Pinterest post. Ultimately, Pinterest is similar to Twitter or Facebook in that it’s another way for publications to reach a large audience and move them to the actual news site. Here is a list of several ways newspapers are using Pinterest. And check out The New York Times’s Pinterest page for an example.

Twitter

  • Twitter is an excellent way to share direct information with a lot of people in quick succession, making it great for breaking news coverage. Personal twitter accounts are also a valuable resource for individual reporters who want to have their own voice within their publication.

Video sharing

  • Apps like Vine and GifBoom allow users to create short videos from their smartphone and then share it with their friends. Vine and Cinemagram compile different video clips to make one longer video, but Gifboom users can combine both still images and video to make a gif. You can link these accounts to Facebook and Twitter to give your friends in those social networks access to the videos you make, as well. They are also easy to imbed into another webpage, so you can also share them on your personal blog or your school newspaper’s website.