More Apps More Problems: How the Next Generation Connects

Too Many Apps, Too Little Time

The Trend

For the younger generation, communication through apps has replaced text messaging and phone calls. The above image is a photo of the common room whiteboard in one of the girl's dorms during the summer session at ASP, 2017. When students arrived, and throughout the summer, they connected via Snapchat. Not only is this totally normal, it's actually preferred by teenagers. It's easy to ask someone for their Snapchat or Instagram. And that's not just because Snapchat gives you a handy QR code for others to add you, it's because teenagers spend more time in that app than they do in text. And more followers means more time on the app talking to friends! That's true of Instagram too, where more followers generally means more likes. And both of these apps allow messaging. Therefore, teenagers don't need someone's phone number when they first connect.

This makes sense to me as a millennial; Facebook was huge for connections in college, but without Facebook messenger, we had to share numbers. And then we communicated via text, a lot. Texting is ubiquitous to Millennials. The generations above us lament the death of the face-to-face conversation and the phone call. Is it now our turn to lament the death of the text message?

Texting is not dead per se, teenagers still text; it's just that this younger generation has so many more options in how it connects. More often than not members of the younger generation send disappearing text and photos through Snapchat. Or they chat on Facebook Messenger. Or they send encrypted communication on What's App. Or they DM on Instagram. Teenagers are all living through a unique era where a number of applications provide connections that are very different from the standard SMS that sustained the social (and now professional) lives of millennials and it's drastically impacting their lives.*

The Impact 

on Health

Given all the ways in which teenagers connect, an individual needs to keep up with a number of apps in order to stay informed. And each app has its own social norms, lexicon, and pitfalls. To be a savant on every one of these apps would be unbelievably time consuming. Heaven forbid a teenager makes a mistake or misreads a digital social cue in one of these spaces. Such a mistake would no doubt be permanent. Given the decreasing cost of data storage, it's safe to assume every message sent and application used is saved permanently.

The amount of stress and anxiety that this social life produces is drastically affecting our teenagers. As Jean Twenge argues in her book iGen, the increase in stress and anxiety comes as our teenagers go out less, drink less, have less sex, spend less time doing homework, have fewer jobs, and are involved in fewer extracurricular activities (I highly recommend iGen for more on the mental stress provided by these applications).

On Schoolwork

In high school, teachers are supposed to connect with students via email, but understanding the current messaging landscape helps me understand why students rarely write back. Email is not an application teens use to connect with each other, so they only use it begrudgingly to connect with teachers. It's just one more application that they have to manage, and it almost never delivers the endorphin rush of other apps.

The other major impact on our schools is the distraction (and trouble) caused by group messaging. Whether a Snap group, a WhatsApp group, a Facebook group, A Skype group, a  Discord board, or an old-fashioned SMS Group Chat, our teenagers are engaged in several messaging groups at once. This monopolizes a lot of their time. At any given moment, one member can fire off a few messages, and before you know it, the whole group of 5, 10, or 15 students is side-tracked during class.

On my classroom

If you read this blog, you know that I require my students to create a social media account to keep up with the content inside and outside of the curriculum. I've written about how I've done that in my history classes, my media classes, and in my elective that's called, "Passion-Based Learning through Social Media." I do this so students can build personalized learning networks and learn beyond the confines of my classroom. I think of these exchanges and activities as social connections that enhance learning, but that's not how this generation sees it. I still believe strongly in why I ask my students to do this and what they get out of it, but my students are less interested every year. I know that's because they're limited by how many apps they use effectively and by the social and educational demands that their screens already require.

While I feel like I'm connecting with my students on their terms, in their preferred applications, and teaching them in that space, it feels to them like something new to learn and somewhere else to invest time. So in the end, I'm not actually teaching them in their space, because any place with a teacher in it, or an app that's required for school is busywork. It's not worth the time, the spontaneity, the humor and creativity that they will invest in their other social networking apps.

*To be fair, you don't have to be young to embrace this new way of  all these new applications. Even my millennial peers try to juggle messages, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and many more.

#MADPD 2018: Investigating the Intersection of Social Media and Education

Yesterday was the second annual MADPD, an online get-together of teachers from all over the world who are "MAD" about Professional Development. Thanks to the organization of Peter Cameron and Derek Rhodenizer, and the technological capacity of YouTube and Flipgrid, educators hosted a number of excellent online PD sessions.

I took advantage of the opportunity for PD by hosting a session about my course "Passion-Based Learning through Social Media" that you can see here. I also convened a discussion panel that investigated two essential questions about teens and social media: 1) How do we get students (and educators) to see social media as a learning opportunity for classroom and extracurricular learning and 2) How do we get students to use their social media time for content creation in addition to content consumption? We had educators in many roles, from many schools, and from multiple countries! Please give it a listen if you're curious about the intersection of social media and education. You can watch it here.

How do schools get more out of Professional Development? Gamify it.

Candyland route (Hasbro)

Most schools have in-service days built into the end of the year to professionally develop teachers. In my career, I've found these days are rarely successful. Teachers don't have the energy or the interest at that point in the year to learn something that they won't use for three plus months. And the person who leads the PD sessions is usually wholly disconnected from the teaching faculty, whether it's an outside consultant or an administrator.

To address the problems described above, this year I designed our PD days this year to use gamification as a way to make it collaborative, personalized, and exciting. I envision teachers working together to incorporate new pedagogical trends into their curriculum for next year. Rather than accomplishing this goal with "talk-at" programming, the game facilitates "work-with" programming. Rather than commissioning a speaker to teach something new (something better saved for end-of-summer PD), this PD is fully personalized. Teachers get to work on their own needs within their own curriculum, and they get to choose which sessions to attend and which colleagues to work with. And by gamifying with Habro's help, I hoped to capture nostalgia and promoted (faux) competition to motivate teachers to enjoy their time on campus without students and to commit to pedagogical development with peers.

We wanted to highlight and expand upon successes from the current school year, so teachers shared successes via Google Form. That way their colleagues can emulate them and/or collaborate with them. To gamify this learning, I blended the various teaching successes into 7 pedagogical trends. These trends became the locations (or "incubators") on the game board that a teacher can visit to learn from and work with colleagues.

Candyland PD Gameplay:

On the Candyland game board, there are 9 locations. We will use the first (Gingerbread Forest) and the last (Candy Castle) as a starting space and ending space. The Gingerbread Forest functions as a space to reflect on successes from the school year. The Candy Castle will be the space to celebrate when a player "wins" the game. In the other 7 locations, called incubators, teachers have to complete a pedagogical task to improve their teaching for next school year [visit this document to see what pedagogical work each of these incubators entails]. We budgeted an hour and a half at each incubator, so that each player has enough time to thoughtfully plan something ready to be used next year--not something that will be forgotten come September. Finally, each player gets his own game board to write down what he does at each incubator in order to win the game.

The incubators range from planning student-centered classes, to using images for formative assessment, to developing interdisciplinary units with colleagues, to switching to competency-based grading for a unit (there's more detail in this document). The tasks get progressively more challenging as a player moves up the board. If a teacher doesn't make it to the Candy Castle, that's totally okay; after all, the best games are challenging.

Teachers Helping Teachers: Powerful Stuff
At first, teachers enhance an existing unit, but by the end, they rethink the way they disseminate information and present themselves to the outside world. Realizing that these are tough tasks for some teachers, the incubators will be staffed with teachers who have successfully completed the task this past year (based on their skillset and self-identified successes received by Google Form). Additionally, for each incubator there is a write-up about a colleague's successful implementation of each pedagogical task. So at each location there's an example to learn from and a teacher to consult with.

For the teachers who aren't comfortable running an incubator, I will recommend using the coaching model, where a teacher asks questions to push a a player to develop a project on his own, or using Sugata Mitra's "granny cloud" technique, where a teacher just provides lots of encouragement.

This game structure requires reflection, planning, and collaboration. Not only will this help individual teachers improve their class and grow professionally, but it will also generate a lot of ideas for the community at large--organically from the grassroots level--to discuss and work on together.

The Secret Sauce: Engagement
All this planning is for naught if we don't also generate energy and buy-in from the teachers. In general, teachers have an internal desire to improve their craft, but that's not enough to sustain PD days in June (summer vacation piques all five senses). To promote collaboration between colleagues and to improve pedagogy at the school as a whole, this game design makes for both light & easy and exciting & entertaining PD. There's no consultant, there's no "expert," there's not even an administrator with a long-term, strategic plan-heavy talk. And there's no preparation other than self-reflection. Teachers are working with colleagues who are in the same head space, with the same goals. That means everything.

The Candyland invention gives the PD days a silly but endearing aura. The game is quirky and unique by design, because we need our teachers to be creative and innovative when they engage in PD. For example, I intend to create a gimmick for the teacher leading the incubator; Lord Licorice can have a licorice crown or Grandma Nut can have some nuts to snack on. I will also use construction paper the colors of the Candyland board on the floor or wall to direct teachers to sessions. These gimmicks inspire smiles and jokes; the smiles and jokes open up conversation which can be quickly steered to pedagogical pursuits. Ideally, this fun improves faculty morale as well. 


There's nothing more engaging and empowering than PD by faculty for faculty; schools always win when they flip their PD goals from institutional demands ("talk-at") to what teachers want for their own development and their own classrooms ("work-with"). The PD described above creatively celebrates and spreads great teaching. It promotes collaboration, trying new things, and keeping up with current trends in education. But most of all, it's fun, exciting, and it builds morale!