Over the years, social media has become more and more integral to modern society. Most, if not all, students have a form of social media. Whether it be Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat or Twitter, a number of people seem to have something to browse or text about. Educational program developers have been attempting to find a way, using social media, to bridge the generational gap between students and teachers to create a deeper teacher-student connection.

SHS has taken a trailblazing approach to social media. Principal Brian Knight has sent teachers to Sosh 101, a summer teachers academy offered by Skymarch University. This workshop provides teachers with the tools to make a fun, yet educational atmosphere around learning how to make lesson plans with a social media teaching focus.

“This course opened my eyes into how dependent students are on social media and how I can use that to get them to remember key concepts by using mee-mees,” math teacher Blake Boston said.

An early concept was meant to be added to the class selection list for the 2018-2019 school year called “Tweaching.” Tweaching was meant to be a two-semester course offered by the social studies department. After our previous story on the announcement of the class, the school met intense scrutiny from the popular social media company, Twitter. The attempt to relate to students ended up costing the school around $20,000 in legal fees and pay out for Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations.

With the severe backlash from Twitter, came the embrace from another social media company. Instagram, a subsidy of the Facebook social media empire, reached out to SHS to offer to fund the course and even offer editing software to make the “best may-mays.” Due to this offer, SHS has made a single-semester pilot course called “The Sosh.”

The Sosh is the ‘Laugh Out Loud,’ totally relatable class that received praise from the Skymarch University social studies department. It teaches the basics of social media, such as how to do the ducklips. Child development experts believe that this course will encourage and develop healthy social media practices among teenagers.