Activity 2: Using Tackk with a Club

At Carmel, I've been asked to take over the Broadcast Club and turn it into something big. A lot of this comes from expanding what the club does and how it is perceived.  As a way of starting this process, I chose Tackk as a way to create surveys, advertisements, and chat boards for students.

Ultimately, Tackk provides users a way of connecting to followers using a vast array of pre-packaged "things" students can use to communicate, collaborate, and create.  I liken this to a control center for all of information being pushed out from a person or group.

Beyond these things, Tackk also has a nice array of educator tools. They are really trying to get the educator community involved and have teamed up with a number of educators around the world to get other teachers and schools on board.

Process - Changing the Perception
There are no

1. The first thing I did was to create a hashtag for the posts - #cchsbroadcast.  In Tackk, when one searches for this tag, they are brought to a page of Tackks that have that tag.  Makes sense, but what is nice about this is that users can immediately create a Tackk from this page by clicking the green button on the right.  This will automatically tag his/her next Tackk with that tag.  Pretty impressive.
2. The next thing I did was to create a survey for students to see if anyone is interested in joining the club.  
3. Next, I created a chat area for students that join Broadcast Club.
4. Finally, I created an Instagram for Broadcast Club and connected it to Tackk.

Activity

The first thing I want students to do is to get an understanding of the Tackk program.  The students will create short videos and share them with the world carefully tagging them with cchsbroadcast.  

What I like about Tackk for this Activity and Club Integration:

• I like the idea of this program being the place by which all communications for the Broadcast Club will be created and disseminated.  This provides for a unified front coming from all of the students in the club.  The look and feel of posts from the club will be similar.
• I like this as a place to hold conversations and to post different things. Hashtags really make this program shine.
• Finally, I like integration with almost every social media platform.  I say almost because there are some that are not in here that are gaining in popularity with teens.  I specifically love the integration with Reddit as I think this is an often forgotten place on the internet.  I feel that teens could really get a lot out of Reddit and probably already are, but schools tend to block it as is the case with my school.

What I don't like about Tackk for this Activity and Club Integration (and everything, really):

• I find it to be really generic.  This might provide users freedom to focus on content, but I just feel that the overall look is kind of bland.
• I love the integration, but I really don't like to be integrated.  It's a great paradox about a lot of people.  I really don't like that my information may exist on their servers.
• Finally, the posts are extremely limited.  For the lesson plan I created, I found that this varied slightly from a regular post.  Basically, they slapped an extra text box to say "teacher - class" and added a place for students to upload assignments (basically, this was the comment section before).

Bottom Line:
I think this would be a really awesome place for clubs to organize and disseminate messages to followers and create places for collaboration for members.  Think of it as a social media manager.  Beyond that, I don't think teachers will get much use out of the extremely limited Educator tools.