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A free summer seminar for experienced high school journalism advisers

From the 23 teachers who attended this workshop in July 2019, we have included Solutions Journalism Story Ideas, other Story Ideas for a whole range of topics and Tech Examples of something they learned, many of these for data visualization, plus some resources anyone can use in the future for these topics.

Social media is blocked at my school

Posted by in Blog | 1 comment

And it causes significant problems for student journalists.

Now, yes, students could simply use their own cellphone network, instead of the school wifi, to access Instagram, Facebook (still a big deal at my school), Twitter (not a deal at all at my school), and whatever else.

But, and here’s the catch, not all wireless companies’ networks work at my school. Verizon is pretty reliable. AT&T doesn’t work at all, essentially.

So what then? Only expect some students to use their data to post? That’s not right, as it could cost some students money to do so. (Yes, I know some of them have unlimited data, but that’s not the whole concern.)

Put someone in charge of all social media posting who doesn’t mind using their data? That doesn’t really make sense, and it would make for a very strange workflow and communication system.

Get them to change the social media policy? Uh, sure. That’ll happen. We’re currently moving in the other direction. YouTube is blocked. You have to request for individual videos to be unblocked. Or, we are told, download the videos at home the night before. (And then hope they work, of course. Or do like I do and use your cellphone as a hotspot in order to show a video and hope you don’t go over your data for the month.)

Somehow we need to solve this problem. If you have any thoughts, I’m all ears, and thank you in advance.

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One Comment

  1. Stacy L Gerst / July 23, 2019

    Talk about a tough situation. Ugh. Do you have a school laptop that is one the school’s wi-fi? Could you then be the hotspot they can attach onto?

    Maybe the way around it would be use one a buffer site to plan and issue the social media postings.

    – I started using Twuffer (https://twuffer.com/) to schedule Twitter postings, but I know there are more sophisticated ones about there. Others that I’ve seen include Buffer.

    – Facebook allows you to schedule postings, so that can be done outside of school as a nightly assignment or once/twice a week, but you can set them up to go out daily then.

    – I’ve never scheduled Instgram posts, but some options appear to include free services like https://later.com/.

    Let me know if you have any luck! I’d like to hear how it goes and/or if you found any other ways around the issue for the time being.