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Show kids how to use social media for good purposes
By Ed Runyan
CHAMPION
In so many instances on the topic of teens and social media, the news is bad. For example, there have been videos of teens committing crimes or otherwise behaving badly, threatening or bullying others, or sexting.
But Tina McCue, director of youth ministry at St. William Parish in Champion, teamed up with the church’s website manager and a technology committee member with the Diocese of Youngstown to put a different spin on the subject.
Recently, about 15 teens from four Warren-area Catholic churches who are part of Warren Catholic Teens met at St. William for a two-hour program to help the teens see ways that they can extend their faith in God to their online lives.
Jocelyn Welsh, director of religious education at St. Joseph Parish in Austintown and a member of the technology committee, started the program by offering ways for the students to protect themselves and their privacy online.
“I made sure they know that anything they put online is a reflection on them,” she said, adding that future employers and colleges mine social media to learn about the young person’s character and personality.
Photographs, especially, are a minefield for young people to watch out for, she noted.
Next, the youths began working on an activity to show them how to use social media — Snapchat and Twitter for example — to help them learn about their religious faith and to share it with others.
The students divided into groups to create a one-minute video filmed on a cellphone on the subject “What Lent Means to Me.”
At the end of the project, the videos were emailed to McCue, who showed them on a projector.
The results demonstrated that young people can express their faith in God openly and effectively when given the chance.
“Our goal is for them to remember their faith in whatever they do,” McCue said.
Even if the young people are not writing or filming original content, a good first step would be finding and reposting faith-based messages they got from other people on the Internet, McCue said.
“Lent is walking with Jesus,” one of the female students said in one of the videos, filmed and produced by Jonathan Mahan, a senior at Champion High School and a member of St. William, who said he’s been shooting videos such as this for fun with his friends for several years.
Mahan said he made his first video for a school project when he was in eighth grade. He and his friends enjoyed it enough to start filming more and showing them to others at school.
Mahan said he never had made a religious video before, but he can see how it would be a good way for him to express his religious faith. “It’s important to me,” he said.
Dan Robinson, who runs the St. William Church website, said he’ll be posting the kids’ work on the site and looking for other ways to get them and other teens involved.
“Church is not just on Sunday,” Robinson said. “For these kids, it can be all the time because they all have cellphones. These kids all have really big hearts, but they don’t always show it.
“By showing you live in a Christian manner, it’s setting examples for others to see,” he said. “Maybe it will cause someone to say, ‘That’s pretty cool. Maybe I’ll go check it out.’”