Welcome to Cycle 6 of The 30 Goals Challenge: Inspire Forward!
“[The hashtag] it served as a way to carry on a conversation with a diverse audience.”- The Huffington Post
Goal: Initiate or support a hashtag movement. Accomplish this goal by creating your own hashtag on social media, getting your students to create their own hashtag movements, or working as a class to create a class hashtag movement. Alternatively, you could get your students to support hashtag movements.
The Power of Hashtags
Hashtags are one of the most powerful ways to communicate and spread messages on social media. In August 2007, Chris Messina introduced hashtags (#) into Twitter’s code, which meant anyone using the platform could add a # sign front of any word(s) without spaces to make it a clickable link leading to a page where all tweets with this hashtag were aggregated. Hashtags are now used on other social media sites, like Facebook, Instagram, and GooglePlus.
Hashtags help people communicate on social media platforms, even if they don’t follow each other, over a common topic and help movements go viral. I have been the founder of various education hashtag movements including #Edchat, #30GoalsEDU, and #EbookEVO. For the past year I’ve been traveling worldwide and inspiring teachers and students to create their own hashtags to inspire positive action. I’ve included an image of students, who attended one of my workshops in Venezuela, writing down their hashtags on butcher paper.
Your students have the power to spread acts of kindness or create awareness campaigns. Recently, 15 year-old Jason Fong created the hashtag #MyAsianAmericanStory in response to politicians’ negative and offensive comments about Asian immigrants in the US. The hashtag has helped many understand the plight of immigrants.
What are your students passionate about? What movements do they want to create?
New to The 30 Goals Challenge? Each year, teachers worldwide aim to accomplish 1 to 30 goals that transform their teaching. Join the movement by accomplishing any goal from any of the cycles then letting us know through a blog reflection or status update on our Facebook community or on Twitter, @30GoalsEdu . At our official site, 30Goals.com, find all the goals, participant reflections, badges, and get your copy of The 30 Goals for Teachers: Small Steps to Transform Your Classroom workbook. Click here to discover all the 2015 goals!
