They like me, They really like me!

I visit a local middle school every week to meet with a small group of eighth graders, all of whom I adore, by the way. Last year I was at this school for two weeks in May, talking with their sixth graders for our Learning about Me program. I was there last week and as I left, there was a group of students standing by the front door waiting for their rides. One boy looked at me for a moment and said “Hey! You’re that sex-ed teacher aren’t you!” The rest of the students-most of whom were seventh graders I had taught last year- turned and looked and a few other kids said similar things. I stopped and talked with them for a minute and then went on my way.

I have to admit, I felt pretty cool.

Really?

Time just announced their Person of the Year on the Today Show. To no one's surprise, it was President-Elect Barack Obama. The shows hosts asks what the President-Elect's reaction was to be given this honor...really? The man was just elected to be the President of his nation...and we expect him to clap and squeal at being named Time's Person of the Year? Particularly ridiculous when you consider that every President since Herbert Hoover
has been named Person of the Year at some point. Sigh.

These are my feelings about today's weather

http://theducks.org/pictures/do-not-want-dog.jpg

Twitter

This summer I attended a meeting where I heard a gentleman speak about a Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program in southern Illinois. They use MySpace to interact with the kids in their programs, and suddenly, a floodgate was opened. My boss was intrigued by the idea of using MySpace and I volunteered to set this up. In August we had a MySpace tutorial at my cubicle, where I showed 5 co-workers how to use the accounts I had created for them. I've been playing with ways to use the blog feature to keep kids thinking about the things we talk about in groups and really enjoying the ability to communicate with them in a more casual fashion than calling or writing them.

I'm also on a committee that organizes an annual conference for junior & senior high school students and by agreeing with another member that a website would be useful for our group, I became the website committee. I've now created a googlepages website, which I am pretty proud of, given my absolute lack of talent for this sort of thing. I've also purchased domain names and created MySpace and Facebook profiles for the conference and read dozens of articles about using social networking within nonprofit groups. Last month my boss volunteered me to join the website redesign committee for my agency and I'm thinking about how I am going to restructure my department's presence on MySpace next summer to make our staff available to every student that hears a presentation or attends a group(last year we served 1,356 through presentations and 539 through ongoing group services).

And now I've made a Twitter account. I'm not sure how well we will be able to use Twitter, either within the agency or the youth conference, but I plan to do lots of looking around and playing with my personal account in the next few weeks. I am just amused that I've become the go-to person in my office for this kind of thing, even in college, I was never a huge Facebook person and I didn't even own a computer until I was 20 years old and Chris gave me a hand-me-down machine that he'd put together.

So has anyone heard of a group that has successfully used these sites for non-profit agencies? Any tips or suggestions for me?