Students stepping up

One of the student leadership roles we have as part of Passionfruit Magazine is the Social Media Manager. This is a key role in terms of building our audience engagement within the target group. It's interesting to note that although the role might be viewed from the outside as a chance for the student in charge to play on Facebook all day, the task of engaging an audience is actually a really complex challenge. We've had a number of discussions over the past couple of weeks about the type and frequency or posts, and have tried out various approaches.

On the weekend of 2/3 March Ezra, our Social Media Manager, hit a good balance of engaging content and frequency of sharing. It's been impressive to watch how her engagement with the role has increased, and how she's becoming increasingly savvy and analytical about how she goes about the role. This was confirmed this evening by several posts she spontaneously made in our project Facebook group sharing and commenting on data from the 'Insights' section of the project page, and relating the current Facebook audience to our magazine's overall target.

It's so rewarding to see students taking control of and responsibility for their own learning!

Passionfruit - the web media wing

It feels like some real progress is being made with the magazine now.

The website is up and running (although constantly under refinement). We currently have three articles published to it, along with a few other links of interest.

www.passionfruitmagazine.co.nz

The Facebook page is also live, with just over 100 'Likes' and growing. Jessie-Lee, one of our students, is running the social media wing of the magazine as her main role in the project. She's been analysing the approaches taken by other visual and popular culture magazines, and is basing her strategy on what she has learned. There's a Pinterest page on the way too.

facebook.com/PassionfruitMagazine

It took some negotiation to get the students' access to social media (in particular Facebook) from within school, and there was a definite lifting of the mood when they were finally allowed access! Since the access has been granted it's been impressive to see how much more sharing of links to a whole range examples of visual culture there has been in our class Facebook Group, compared to when they only had access from home.