“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ― Anaïs Nin
After a near year-long sentence of standardized testing, writing boot camps, college application outlines, and scholarship essays, one would believe writing is the furthest thing from the mind of any high school student―until you look at the newsfeed on social media. Without the obligations of school schedules and class assignments due, social media is buzzing, dinging, and singing with hallelujah praises in constant posts causing notifications of timelines filling up by the nanosecond. Now that school and the idea of getting caught with an unauthorized device is no longer a distraction, students are flooding their media pages with everything from prom pictures to farewell adieu’s to their schools, classmates, and teachers alike.
This uninhibited written interaction includes frequent status updates, posts, tweets, and responses indicating more participation in continuing discussions of current events, popular culture, and national news trending equally as fast. So what does this daily, up-to-the-minute writing indicate about the lack of academic activity students are said to experience called Summer Learning Lag (SLL), the existential gap in academic rigor students face once they have left the confines of the classroom for the unsanctioned and unscheduled life of sleeping in and staying up late―only to return to the school year slow to take off or even behind? How can social media habits such as written responses, status updates, and posts about Beyonce covertly promote habits of writing to combat this predicted decline in brain function? Simple: keep em posting.
Viewing how important and necessary teaching with technology is essential to facilitating differentiated learning, using social media to encourage purposeful writing can keep students writing while allowing them to do what they do most―inform the world of their thinking on social media. Encouraging students to interact on social media is a sure-fire way to keep them writing by engaging in discussions or prompts that will allow students to express their ideas in the venue and format they find most comfortable. In an effort to generate a fun dialogue, Scribe Tribe Writing Tutors invites students, and followers alike to participate in our social media writing initiative. The #WritetoSummer project promotes this form of writing through sharing tweets, responses, statuses, images, or posts about summers past, present, or future.
Join the conversation and respond to #WritetoSummer and let this summer write itself.
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