Teaching and Tweeting: Megan and Mark’s Week With the Zajel Program at An Najah University

Last week, Mark and I taught a five-day seminar series on Social Media for the Zajel Summer Program at An Najah University. We focused primarily on how to use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Blogs to promote your campus club, business, non-profit organization and even yourself online. Our approach to teaching these workshops was to not only provide more information about popular social networking tools but to also offer a chance to practice using them with guidance from teachers who use these applications on a regular basis.

Our students had a great time practicing creating Facebook pages and blogs dedicated to a range of topics, including a fake campaign to create an artificial sea in Nablus (the “We Need a Sea in Nablus” Facebook page). As a Twitter enthusiast, I most enjoyed sharing my love of tweeting with my students. Twitter was a site that everyone in the class had heard of but didn’t know much about. They were keen to learn more about it and we helped them to set up their own accounts. We also offered tips on how to link different social media accounts to each other in order to maximize your online audience.

Tomorrow’s Youth Organization has a well-established online presence and we were able to showcase these social media pages and blogs in our classes. The students moved quickly through the class material and despite some technical and technological glitches, we covered many social media topics throughout the week. Through our lesson plans and our highlighting of TYO's active social networking presence, we were able to show our students that anyone can have a voice online if they have knowledge and access to these tools.

The students we met at An Najah were amazing and we appreciated having the opportunity to interact with young people in Nablus through the Zajel program. A recent UN report declared access to the Internet a basic human right. I hope that our students will continue to enjoy that access and use it to its full potential as members of the worldwide web!

- Megan

Megan is a summer intern at TYO Nablus.