Using Hashtags to Engage Your Students
Video Transcript
We're going to spend a little bit of time discussing this symbol '#'. This is a hashtag. Now for some of you who are a little bit older it might be called a pound sign. Yes that appeared on your old telephone, it might have even appeared on your rotary telephone depending on how old you are. It is a hashtag.
Hashtags are used in social media when we engage with students to coordinate posts around a particular topic. If we're talking about how we're going to engage with students, if we're talking about how we're going to make sure that they see what we're doing and we see what they're doing we kind of need to get them all on the same page as to how we're going to post. We use hashtags to do that.
Maybe you've seen a college football game or maybe even a professional football game or basketball game where people put a hashtag up and say big game or hashtag this #teamvsthatteam. Maybe even it's #biggame. Maybe that's all they put up.
That's a way for people who are watching that game to participate with what's going on with other fans, with other people who are participating in that conversation.
When I was working with a group of middle school students we chose a hashtag together. We all sat down and decided this is the hashtag we're going to use so that when we put posts on social media whether it be Twitter, which is kind of where the hashtag all got started, or even Facebook or Instagram, those hashtags allowed us to know what other people in the group were doing.
I allowed my students to help pick the hashtag. I would encourage you if you're going to use a hashtag for your group ask your students to help create it because it's something they'll buy into, it's something they'll continue to use. It's something that they can talk to their friends about and remember hey this is what we're looking at. It's something they'll frequently visit if they remember
Use a hashtag for your group to coordinate around posts so that if your students are learning something about God's word and a passage of the bible just really stuck out to them today they could take a picture of that and hashtag it with your group on it and say, "This is something that God has been showing me" and hashtag your youth group, whatever that may be.
The other possibility for hashtags, and I just want you to be aware of this, is sometimes students use hashtags as kind of commentary, inner voice, speaking out loud. For instance they take a picture of eating an entire pizza and say, "Just ate 16 pieces of pizza #Imabouttoexplode #neverbeenfuller."
They use these sometimes in a way to basically comment on what they just finished saying. If they feel as though the post that they just made doesn't give enough internal explanation they'll just put a hashtag on the end of it. You can hashtag anything. You can make a brand new hashtag anytime you want by just putting this little symbol # in front of any phrase. Just don't put any spaces because the moment you put a space in it's not longer that hashtag.
At the end of the day I want you to realize that your students are talking online. A lot of times they're talking about things that are going on in their life or even things that are important to their faith. By using a hashtag you give them the capacity to coordinate with one another and to understand not only that they are not alone but that other people are going through similar things or are experiencing similar things.
To learn more about these discussions about what does it mean to engage students using technology you can download my free e-book 11 Ways to Engage Students using Technology.
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