Bird by bird ...

I'm doing some 1:1 teaching this summer, working with a rising 11th grader to answer her tech questions from this past school year so that she goes back to school this coming fall better armed to present class projects using social media. While talking with her this past year, it became clear to me that her school was giving the option of creating a social media or non-social media project presentation. And these projects were all "group efforts".  And of course, she and her team defaulted to the non-social media approach, not because they weren't interested in technology, but honestly, I've found in all my years teaching tech, it is pretty overwhelming for new social media users to:

Know what applications best suit their project
Have devices that don't block these applications (school devices in particular)
Take the time to work through tech fails and successes
Have a group of 2-3 kids cooperate in the way it takes to pull this off in 2-3 weeks

It is one of my frustrations with public education and teaching tech, that non-technical options are allowed in situations like this. Kids get overwhelmed, defer, and then go around thinking "technology is too hard". And in situations like my 10th grader experienced, yes, it was too hard, but not because she wasn't smart enough to work through it. So....

This summer, she and I are going to walk through step by step, easy to use applications, you might call an introduction to "social media literacy", essentials to get a HS student through creating most social media class projects. This is my idea so far:

Open a Weebly account so she knows how to create and publish a free website
Download a free recording app on her phone (I'm testing Voice Recorder) to use to create podcasts
Download the free screen cast app on her PC, SOM (Screencast-o-matic) to create 10 min videos
Upload her podcast and video projects to her Youtube channel to link to her Weebly website

This way, I don't want her to feel like the pressure of organizing a project peer group crowds out time for taking the risk and rewards to pull off a social media presentation. And, I'll create a "how to" video summary of what we cover for her to reference shared to her Youtube channel from my Youtube channel.

It all leaves me thinking of one of my favorite gems from Anne Lamott's book: "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life":

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”