Having Students Reflect on Their Online Behaviour and Usage Through Journaling

Outcomes

CC B10.4 Create a variety of written informational (including a business letter, biographical profile, problem solution essay) and literary (including fictionalized journal entries and a short script) communications.

AR B10.2- Set personal language learning goals and select strategies to enhance growth in language learning.

Course Theme

The World Around Us and Within Us

Overview

For students to engage with their media consumption they should take time to reflect on what they are consuming and why they are consuming it. This is why students should take time to journal about their social media habits, and what they liked or did not like about that media.

One aspect of the ELA course in Saskatchewan that can be easily overlooked are the Assess and Reflect (AR) outcomes. These are the outcomes that ask students to reflect on their language learning and create goals about how they want to improve in their language learning in the future. These outcomes require a lot of time and modelling for students to understand what it takes to make a deep reflection of their work.

One way to expand the Assess and Reflect outcomes is to redefine what is meant by “language skills” in the curriculum. Many times language skills can only be described as a student’s reading and writing skills, but their language skills go far beyond those two strands of literacy. Students need to think about all strands of their literacy, including their social media literacy. To do this, students will journal about their media consumption on two days of the week and reflect on what they viewed and what they think this media was telling them.

The hope with this task is to have students investigate why they are making the choices they are on social media to try and gain a better understanding of themselves. Part of this deals with the change in focus social media literacy has from mass media literacy. In their conception of social media literacy, Cho, Cannon, Lopez, and Li state the social media competency of analysis differs from analysis of traditional media in how it “includes the abilities to monitor and observe one’s social media use behaviour, motivations, and outcomes” (Cho et al, 2022). For reasons like this, social media literacy needs to be looked at with a different set of skills than traditional media analysis. Instead of analysis of the content being presented itself, the focus of analysis in social media shifts to the self and “the choices it makes about what content to consume and engage with” (Cho et al, 2022). This makes social media literacy a much more reflective process that requires more time for consumers to think about their choices and what values they represent.

How it can de conducted?

Social media journaling could take a number of forms. Students could be encouraged to set up traditional blogs on websites such as WordPress, or Blogger and update their blogs once a week, or whatever amount of time the teacher sets as they believe appropriate.

However, traditional written blogs do not have to be the only way students can journal about their social media lives. Students could create a monthly vlog where they take on a month long investigation into what their social media diets look like. They could look at the amounts of time they spend on certain apps, and go through what they were most likely to engage with.These vlogs do not have to be uploaded to a website like YouTube if students are not comfortable with putting their videos out into the world.

As well, there is no reason that students could not take part in the practice of traditional journaling if access to digital technology is a problem. They will still be engaging with the process of reflecting on their media consumption and the affects their choices have on them.

No matter what their method of journaling is, the practice of consistent reflection should aid students in assessing their own media choices and help them develop a deeper sense of social media literacy.

References

Cho, H., Cannon, J., Lopez, R., Li, W. (2022). Social media literacy: A conceptual framework. New Media and Society, p. 1-20. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/14614448211068530.

Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. (2011). Saskatchewan Curriculum: English Language Arts 10. https://curriculum.gov.sk.ca/CurriculumHome?id=37.