Despite the bad name social media gets when it comes to influence on teenagers, there are many positive outcomes of schools utilizing social media to communicate with students, parents and community and to build a feeling of connectedness.
Student journalists at WHS are learning to utilize different social media platforms to speak about events, and plans for new platforms in the future. Instagram and Facebook accounts are managed to communicate with outsiders about events taking place, progress being made, and outcomes of many events.
Social media has been a complaint affecting teenagers’ brains for years now, “Social media platforms are impacting a child’s brain development in a very specific way. These platforms give adolescents the opportunity for increased social interaction at a time when their brains are especially sensitive to social feedback, particularly reward feedback,” Healthmatters.nyp.org stated.
Although it may seem that social media is leaving a negative impact, it is also leaving a positive impact. Without social media many locals would not be reached or informed on upcoming, current, or past events. As the school-ran pages are to make upcoming game day posts, upcoming events, inform about situations going on, and many different announcements are the school district.
Lot’s of time and perspective has been put into every social media account, dedication to make posts for information on every event occurring is put in through every student that is a part of the journalism class.
As a total of the WHS poll, where seventy-nine students responded, 63.3% of students’ rely on Instagram and 57% of students rely on Facebook. A newspaper goes around once a month, but that’s not enough to inform each event happening for the whole month, especially if events pop up. That is where the social media accounts come into place.
The journalism class maintains Instagram and Facebook accounts, and hopes to expand to a TikTok with social media reporting. Communicating through the most used social media platform could have a more positive outcome on student’s attending and knowing about events.