Companies wield social media skilfully to market their products. But you  can show students that social advertising can also be used for benevolent campaigns. To this end teacher Madli-Maria Naulainen from Kuressaare Gymnasium Estonia, asked students to create social ads for the benefit of the local community.

An active citizen is someone who takes a role in the community, who is not only a passive taxpayer and receiver of services, but who contributes to the betterment of their surroundings, and asks what is already being done, and what should be done by the government for the society. With the youth green movement, active citizenship has become an even more relevant topic for students. The social media can be a great tool for students to learn about active citizenship. Most students use social media regularly, and this way they will discover new ways of use.

Through this scenario, the teacher discovers the personal strong qualities of her students and hence observes the different social roles emerging in each classroom. This scenario has numerous benefits. Firstly, it is interdisciplinary because it is possible to combine this practice with Informatics, Art and Citizenship subjects. Secondly, it is a great opportunity to practice critical thinking and media literacy, very important in a world of big data and media disinformation. Finally, it is a great way to activate students and assess their progress through multiple digital formative assessment tools.

Madli-Maria’s students started out by exploring existing social advertisements and posting them on a Padlet. This way, they got to discover various types of media: social media posts, animations, videos, print media, and more. The teacher then projected all these posts on the whiteboard to start a discussion about what they thought about each, what makes each ad work and why they liked a particular ad. This activity is very flexible in terms of devices; students can also use a single computer in teams and focus more on brainstorming.

Students then split into groups using Keamk, a very nice tool to create random teams. Each team came up with a few social advertisement ideas and posted it on Tricider. All the ideas were projected for the whole class and every idea was evaluated by everyone anonymously; this way everyone could openly say their thoughts. This is a good method to quickly see if there are any misconceptions about social advertising, for instance, whether any team posted ideas related to a consumer product instead of addressing a problem in the local community. The teacher could then clarify some aspects before moving on to the next step.

The teams then started their project: developing their own social advertisement. They were free to choose different methods; a poster made on Canva, a video or image, posts on social media, or anything else they proposed.

Students posted their final outputs on Padlet. This is where another discussion started: What do they think about a particular social ad? Which one do they prefer? Why? 
“The challenge here is that the discussion typically starts out by focusing on superficial aspects such as the chosen pictures or the wording.” says Madli-Maria. Here the teacher can moderate the discussion and steer it towards how posts in the media are created in the same way as the students just did in class. The bottom line is that social ads can create enormous impact – both positive and negative. More discussion emerges on the ethics, their own reactions to well-known social advertisements and their effectiveness.

The next step was a voting on the best advertisement on Tricider; every team provided pros and cons to the outcome. The Classroom Screen app was used to: (1) show the elapsed time to students at every step, (2) randomly select a student to comment; and (3) control the class noise level. This added an element of excitement.

Finally, the teacher collects feedback on the whole activity through a survey tool like Google Forms. The outcome of the lesson can also be shared within the school as posters on walls or the school website or videos in the school channels. To make it a citizen initiative project, teachers and students can contact the local government to see how their work can be disseminated to raise awareness in the municipality.