#EarthDay2016

Many moons ago I worked with a woman whom I absolutely adored, and it just so happened that she adored Earth Day. Each year we would stop whatever we were doing and observe Earth Day in our AP English Language and Composition classes and have some sort of an Earth Day celebration. This year I decided my kids needed a break from all of the "AP testing" pressures, so we had ourselves a little Earth Day assignment.

My course focuses on rhetoric and the study of persuasion, so we spend the whole year discussing how to persuade effectively based on the rhetorical situation. We work hard to find "real world" situations for the learners to both analyze other's persuasion and to create persuasive pieces of their own.

With those things in mind, we kept the activity simple. We simply asked them to create a product (in my class that is the code word for "anything") that would encourage and/or inspire the same ideas and principles intended by Earth Day. The kids had one partner and one class period (52 minutes) to come up with an idea, make that idea happen, and post their completed product to social media. For fun, we created a little competition to see which post had the furthest reach. I'll talk more about how I did this later.

First, I want to show you a few things my kids came up with. I had everything a little bit of everything: infographics; lots of pic collages; lots of girls who jumped at the chance to use construction paper, glue, scissors, and markers; and even a few video submissions. The kids got a nice break from the rat race of test prep and all night study sessions, and I got to see a bit more of their creative side. It was fun, and I hope, at least a little bit "purposeful."

As a part of the assignment, I required my learners to use #CHSAPLAC on their social media post if they wanted to be considered for the furthest reach contest. On the Tuesday following Earth Day, I created a TweetBeam to showcase all of the #EarthDay products, so their work would be on display in the room. We had a real quick lesson on how to run analytics on Twitter for your own account, which most the kids already knew how to do. Then, I ran analytics on the #CHSAPLAC hashtag to see the total number of impressions, retweets, etc for those kiddos who used Twitter. There are a lot of different tools out there that can do this, but I used TweetReach. The only downside here was that it will only run analytics on the last 100 Tweets with a given hashtag and within the last 7 days. Might not work in all situations, but it was enough to do what I needed it do. 

While I forgot to take a screen shot of my analytics, I was impressed to find that my learners last 100 tweets had a total number of impressions of more than 25,000 within 4 days. This was not ALL of their posts because some used other social media accounts. The maker of TweetReach has analytics features for Instagram, Tumblr, and other social media accounts as well. This was a nice reminder for my kids that their posts go a lot further than they might realize! A win/win in my book :-)