Teaching different age groups

I have joined many communities and groups and followed many Social Media Professors in an attempt to gain knowledge from those that are already teaching a Social Media course.  I have found that some are teaching the course based on assumptions that all their students are already using social media.  These professors skip the introduction of the social media applications and jump into complicated and lengthy campaigns.  I am making the assumption that the course they are teaching is not an introductory course and there may have been a pre-requisite to their course.

Since my course will have both those that know and use Social Media on a daily basis and those have may have only dabbled in Facebook a little,  it is a challenge to develop content. The adult learners in the class may struggle a bit and need to put in mo8re time than the traditional aged students.

Since it is a brand new class, there will be tweaking done for next semester after I gauge the success and failures of the assignments.  Since this is a community college course, I expect the traditional students to try to skip through assignments and take the quizzes without prepping. I also expect the adult learners to do every assignment and maybe struggle with some of them.  Since the adult learner may not be proficient with the technology they are using; cell phone, tablet or PC, I wonder how everything will play out by the end of the semester.  If I get one adult learner a with a brand new smart phone😳, the first they have ever owned, I may have to recommend they withdraw, as this is not a course to learn technology but rather to use new applications or to better use the applications you have used before.

Animoto Video Evaluation

I signed up for the 14 day free trial of Animoto and create a quick video.

I thought the tool was a little pricey, but I still included an assignment using this tool and the SnapChat story feature for students to compare the two video creation tools.

Blackboard Learn

Today, I spent the better part of 4 hours developing the graded Assignments in Blackboard Learn, our course management system.  Most of the assignments will just hold the grade for the blog posts, account creations, etc.  However, I did create a few quizzes and assignments where a worksheet will be uploaded.  With the worksheet and blog post assignments, I had to create rubrics so that students could see where they had points taken off in their assignment submissions.

I have worked in a few course management systems over the past few years, including MyITLab and Blackboard Learn.  I am striving to have the entire course be smart phone or tablet compatible, however, I am not sure if Blackboard will allow this for all the assignments.  I will be testing this in the near future and post an update here.  Most days, I have my IPAD and laptop open at the same time to make sure everything is smart phone compatible.

Developing this course has been a huge amount of work!

Ingenious Google Graphic

This is the graphic displayed on Google today. I thought it was a very ingenious way to recognize Sir Frederick Grant Banting's Birthday, a Nobel laureate noted as the first person to use insulin on humans.

Videos as Social Media

Creating a video that generates a lot of views can take some time, but once in a while, one falls into your lap.

During a visit to NY City, riding on the subway........

Review of my CIS-141 social media course by a recent college student

I asked my 24 year old daughter, who graduated college a few years ago, what she thought about my Social Media Online course. She attempted to get to the Wordpress private website and of course had to create a wordpress account and request access. She thought this was a little confusing because once she signed into Wordpress, she was not taken to my website and had to click again.   I will be emailing instructions for accessing my website and they will also get an invitation from Wordpress with a link to click. 

A half hour later, here were her thoughts on the course:
Doesn't seem like too much work! Did you watch the videos or read the text assigned?
I guess I never watched the videos when they were assigned so I didn't count that as time.
I think it has a good mix between reading and online stuff, I guess your not going to do actual tests right?   I have to design 3 quizzes in Blackboard learn and a final campaign assignment.
I guess a lot of people may already have LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. They may, but they have to grow the accounts in the course to help promote their personal brands.
I like it...I'd take it!

Monitoring student blogs made easy

Feedly is going to help me monitor student blogs.  Since it will be helpful to me, I decided to include it as an assignment so students can monitor the other students blog posts.  This could be a good thing or a bad thing, mainly, I worry about plagiarism. I will be looking intensely for those students that copy another blog post and do small edits and then submit as their own assignment. I hope none of my students get 0's.

Created with Adobe Spark

Social Advertising

I developed an assignment on Social Advertising without having students spend money on an Ad.  I decided on an analysis of one of @BestOfAds, using a blog post.

Here is my analysis of this Ad I re-tweeted. https://twitter.com/bestofads/status/626205759945220096

This Ad was a tweet engagement with an objective of starting a conversation.  The objective was to get a message out about not to drive while under the influence of alcohol. At first it was hard to distinguish a specific audience. I did a little research on the ages of those with DUI's.  It appears that 34% are between the age of 21 and 24, 34% between the ages of 25 and 34 and 25% between the ages of 35 to 44. If I had to select a target audience, I would use a keyword target, using the keywords "party" and "drink".