This week I am in lovely Black Mountain, North Carolina to give a training at the YMCA Youth Worker Summit.   Teen and youth program staff from 28 states are here at the Y’s mountaintop conference facility (yes, the YMCA has some amazing resources) to learn how to serve young people better.  I felt like I was around people honestly committed to making America a better place, which made me very happy.

I presented an interactive session on social media perceptions.  Usually I would do this using a slide presentation, but the conference was very active and camp-like (silly dancing and such) so I decided to so something a lot more kinesthetic and participatory than I usually do.  I think it went really well and I feel I am becoming ever more Beth-like as a digital activism trainer, which is my ultimate goal 🙂

Here are some pics:

Setting up a social media spectrogram on stage (I’m 2nd from the left) with five volunteers who will act out different opinions of social media.

This participant is acting out the skeptic’s position: “I use social media in my personal life, but I don’t see its value in my work at the Y.” After the set-up, participants congregated to the position that best expressed their feelings about social media.

The social media spectrogram in action: Most participants clustered to the far right, meaning they are excited about the use of social media in promoting the Y. (I’m in the foreground reading my notes.)

Group work: discussions on the theme “room to grow: how my Y can develop its social media use”

More happy faces, despite the fact that my session was right before lunch.