Describe your project. What did you do? How did you do it?

My project for Tech Team this past year was being a part of the Social Media team. We had a bunch of focusses and ideas to help improve our outreach and content to our audience. We wanted to have a more personalized and ‘people’ page instead of just posting advertisements. The team and I wanted to include more quantity of members of our school, whether it be students on a trip, hike, doing a project, presentation or experiment. Our goal was to get more interaction and create a closer community with our social media platforms, and gain more followers, not just students but teachers and parents too. All together, the team worked on posting and creating great content with visual art platforms to create advertisements and capturing pictures to post. We tried to post on the story everyday, and each person was designated a day of the week to post, evening out the workload. We also created a weekly newsletter including all the RAP notes for the week, which a remanding person was responsible for. I also created a RAP presentation to help us gain more followers, and reach out to the school community more, asking for them to send us pictures they may want posted.

What problems did you run into? Were you able to solve these challenges? How did you solve these challenges? Is there anything you would do differently?

The biggest problem we ran in to was meeting. It was very difficult for our group to meet since we all have busy schedules, especially with it being the end of the school year. However, we did schedule times to Skype and group call, since it was too hard to meet at a time in person. Another challenge we ran into was staying on top of posting. We did a great job of posting different content and not spamming peoples feeds with ads for the school, but we did fall a bit apart on posting consistently near the end. If I were to do something different, I would set more reminders in my phone to remind myself and remind others in my team in our chats to post on their days.

 

What did you learn? Were you able to learn new skills or strengthen previous ones?

Skill wise, I think I gained more strength in my communication skills and my visual design/creative thinking skills. Some times we would need to create our own posts such as schedules, club meetings, sports etc. and by doing this I learned how to make visually appealing posts to put on our instagram page and be creative while doing so using apps like canva, photoshop etc. Also, I strengthened my time management skills, I’ve always been busy with extracurriculars and sports, but with this being an IDS course, I really had to motivate myself and stay on top of it since I was not getting reminded by a teacher everyday like all my other courses.

 

Impact: How might your project positively impact the social and emotional well being of students/our school? What can be done to increase the impact of this idea on the school?

I believe that our instagram is very inclusive. We try to post about all students, all clubs, all activities and all sports. And I believe by doing this we are positively impacting our students to feel welcomed and appreciated. I think to increase these, we need to get more exposure to other groups around the school to make more feel involved.

Screenshots from Rapidevent Instagram

                                                          June 2019                                                        October 2018

 

 

Desirability: What could you change to make your project more desirable to students, teachers, administrators, parents or the community?

To make this project more desirable I think that including more contests and interactions with our school and community would work well. Whether it be contests to win prizes, or just polls and asking for people to send in more things for us to post.

 

Integratabilnty: What would you change to make this idea easier to integrate into a school setting?

I think our project and all our ideas are quite easy to integrate into a school setting. We just need to keep monitoring our posts and comments and making sure all our content is appropriate and professional.

Feasibility: Looking back what would you change what would you keep?

Looking back, I think I would keep everything we’ve done, just make the work more consistent and try to get our followers more involved. Everyone on my team are great leaders, and we all spoke our ideas and thoughts and put a lot of meaning into everything we did. Therefore, because of this I believe I wouldn’t change much about what we accomplished this year with our project.

What did you learn from being a part of this project?

From working on this project I have realized how big of an impact social media can make. I personally learned the power of social media, and how big the platforms really are. It amazes me how many people you can reach with a single post. I also was able to learn how to reach out to our school community and what type of posts work and what times to post reach the most of our followers, by using the business account and being able to see our views and interactions.