For our last project in our English 211 course, we were given the role of a teacher and were to make a module based on a social media platform. This was extremely interesting as there are so many to choose from and who really pays attention to how they get started. Everyone uses them it seems, but how they got started and who is behind them is not really important, or so I thought. For this project, it definitely comes into play.
For this project, I worked with my good friend Tiffany Dye. After some back and forth about this project, we agreed to us YouTube as our social media platform. We both had interest because of the amount of use and traffic that the site receives. We thought that everyone seems to use the site for different uses, whether it be for educational reasons or entertainment value. Now that we have chosen our platform, it’s on to making a module.
We had a few discussions in person and on the social media messenger Hangouts. We discussed the direction we wanted to go in regarding the quiz, discussion, reading content, and an assignment based on the site. Having students in mind, we wanted to challenge those who are unfortunate enough to engage our module. We didn’t want to make it too easy, but rather try to educate and let them have fun with it.
We split up the work. Tiffany chose to do the information links that led to the quiz and had a great idea for the discussion. The quiz was going to entail the creation and general information about YouTube. The discussion was based on those who got their big break on YouTube. It showcases a great video on how people can “make it big” if they are lucky and opportunistic. A bit of an added challenge is that students must not cover the same person who “made it,” in writing about an individual who made it big, or captured their fifteen minutes of fame.
I chose to take on the assignment and the blog entry. For the assignment, I chose to let users take a short overview of how to make a channel, which is a big part of the YouTube experience. It allows people to find other users easily by subscribing to said user’s channel. This gives each user the ability to have the videos that they are most likely interested in, front and center and easily accessible. I also wanted to give users the knowledge of how to monetize their video. To let their video make them money for them. For the blog entry, I found a great TedTalk video that illustrates why videos go viral and how to capitalize on that moment. We felt that this was a good video to include and that students should write their thoughts on why they think videos go viral, what they would make a channel about and their thoughts of any benefits of monetizing their videos.
We tried to incorporate Mr. Depner’s way of approaching his modules as a guideline. This proved to be useful in some aspects such as making links guide the student in the right direction. How to get them thinking about what we were presenting them as well as providing information that would educate as well as entertain.
Together, I think Tiffany and I did a great job on this project and had fun doing it. I thought this was a fun and engaging part of the class. Hopefully, Mr. Depner will be able to use our module in the future and students will enjoy the content as much as we did putting it together.
