Class Intercom recently launched its annual Content GenerationⓇ Award contest with one exciting update: a student category. School stories are told from a variety of perspectives, and recently, students have added their voice to school social media channels.
After an exciting entry period, the deliberation committee narrowed content generation nominations to 10 student finalists before a five-day voting period ensued. With over 8,000 student votes, two students were named winner and runner up of the 2022 Content Generation AwardⓇ on March 30th for their innovation, creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration.
And the Winner is…
Natalie Keller, a senior student at Seward Public Schools, is this year’s Content GenerationⓇ Award Winner for her work as a Social Media Intern at her school. Mr. Rich Eber, Seward High School Assistant Principal, said, “Natalie has done an outstanding job working with Class Intercom to tell the great stories of SHS!”
Natalie’s contribution to her school’s social media team covers a variety of responsibilities.
- Natalie is her school’s Class Intercom Content Generation Manager. She keeps the schedule of events, a spreadsheet that lists all the events of the school year, and assigns students to be the social media representative for each activity and event. This role ensures that activities and participants are highlighted on the school’s social media channels.
- When a new representative joins the social media team, they must learn how to create content using the Class Intercom platform. Until the recent release of the new Class Intercom Certification program, Natalie trained new representatives, so they could begin contributing quality content.
- In November, Natalie led a team of representatives as they presented to educators and school technology professionals at the Fall Nebraska Technology Conference (NETA) about how student leaders drive technology communication in schools.
- As part of her school’s content calendar, “Who Knew Wednesday” and “Throwback Thursday” are weekly posts. For the past three years, Natalie has created these posts with the goal of highlighting and including more staff and students, as well as engaging alumni, on their social media channels.
As a student leader, Natalie has goals for Seward Public School’s social media pages. She wants to add more creative videos and pictures to connect with more audiences. Natalie’s participation and leadership on the social media team has shaped her future goals. She reported, “Overall, Multimedia and Class Intercom has influenced me positively and led me to decide to pursue a media-related career in college!”
And the Runner-Up Award Goes to…
Elliot Ma, fourth grade student at Bear Creek Elementary School in the Austin Independent School District in Austin, Texas, is a leader of content generation. He started learning coding at school when he was a kindergartner and has been coding his own games ever since. “His goal is to teach others coding from a kid-to-kid aspect,” says Elliot’s father, Ethan Ma. “He loves to incorporate his school assignments with his coding skills turning them into fun coding projects.”
It all started with Elliot asking himself one question, “What would happen if I made my own video game?” With curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking, that’s just what Elliot did, he created Code&Gameology in 2021 so he could share his love of coding with others. He plans and makes his coding projects, and he fixes his own bugs and coding errors. He shares his videos on YouTube to teach others how to code. His innovation, creativity, critical thinking, and communication earned his nomination and votes as the runner up of the 2022 Content Generation Award.
About the Contest
As the winners of the award, Natalie and Elliot received Class Intercom swag, a certificate of award, an exclusive invitation to write a blog for Class Intercom, and for qualifying winners, a lifetime membership to the Quill and Scroll International Journalism Honor Society along with a graduation honor cord.
Recognizing student social media content generators is important to us. The 2021 Social Media in Education report found that schools have been engaging students in contributing to their content in both the classroom and club settings. Seventeen percent of respondents indicated that they plan to implement student-lead social media content generation programs soon. With student content creation on the rise, we wanted to celebrate and encourage them.
A big thank you to the nominators and nominees. We want to celebrate all our finalists. We see young people as The Content GenerationⓇ. We want them to observe the people around them, engage in conversations, make connections, share their abilities, and care about their neighbors. Social media is one of the ways that we can influence these behaviors and provide authentic, hands-on experiences for students to understand the power of content generation with social media.
Congratulations, Natalie and Elliot!
