Vasquez Says

Twitter and tweeting sparks many questions and doubts for first time users:

What do I tweet about?

Why would anyone care what I tweet about?

Who do I follow?

These are valid questions, and I had to facilitate a lot of the answers and general understanding of Twitter (and communications as a whole) for the teens participating in the URBAN Teens eXploring Technology 2013 Summer Hackaneer Academy. 

Across 8-weeks I worked as part of the leadership team to develop programming to help jumpstart these teens experience as techpreneurs. My areas of focus were social media, communications, market validation, product and market research, and general leadership development.

As part of my chunk of programming I created a workshop that aimed to break down the barriers that a lot of first-time Twitter users face while teaching more advanced users some alternate uses for Twitter. 

Also, the workshop aimed to frame Twitter as a tool for developing professional and personal relationships, generating opportunities, and participating in conversations with people in relevant communities. 

Here is how we executed it:

Broke up the teams into small groups of 3-4

Each small group was given a list of challenges

Via Tweetdeck I monitored progress as they accomplished challenges

They had 30 minutes to accomplish tasks

We had a 15 minute debrief of the lesson 

Main take-aways and outcomes: 

Content generation

Content curation

Tweet formulation 

Twitter search

Public speaking (driven by the challenges)

Teamwork