T&L Advisor Guest post — Carl Hooker, Director of Instructional Technology, Eanes Independent School District: The past few weeks I’ve spent some time working with our primary customers…kids. I was able to visit secondary students at a couple of different schools including my own Westlake High School. The main purpose around my time with the kids was to talk, but more importantly, listen to what they had to say about living in a social media-rich world. I heard some predictable tales about cyberbullying and posting inappropriate images (my full post here ), but I found two things pretty amazing. The first was when I asked them if they thought social media could help them get a job. About half of the kids believed at some point it could and recent research by CareerBuilder backs up their statement to some extent. The most surprising thing was when I asked them to list as many social media sites as they could in 2 minutes. While there were some usual suspects (Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat, etc), there were also some unusual answers like Amazon, Google Docs, and Xbox Connect. When you think about it, though, any platform that allows you to have social interaction is social media. While this may leave some parents shaking in their non-digital boots, I find it helpful. If we can stop focusing on the apps and more about the behavior of kids online in the form of meaningful conversation rather than lecture, we can go a long way of truly using social media for good rather than evil. After all, with great power comes great responsibility…
