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Teach Social Media Book
I am beyond thrilled to announce that my new book, Teach Social Media: A Plan for Creating a Course Your Students Will Love, is now available on Amazon in paperback and eBook formats.
It has been a long and exciting journey. I am so glad to finally be able to share this project with you. It is one of my most ambitious undertakings. I can best describe it as an organized “brain dump” of my knowledge about teaching a social media class for students interested in careers as professional communicators (e.g., public relations, marketing).
Grab a copy of Teach Social Media: A Plan for Creating a Course Your Students Will Love through Amazon now!
The book is available in paperback and Kindle eBook formats.
A Book With Social Media Class Assignments, Activities, and Exercises Organized into a Class Plan
This 9-chapter, 216 page book is an end-to-end plan for creating a social media course for students studying public relations, marketing, and related fields. In it, I walk you through a 15-week semester.
The book contains chapter appendixes with social media workshop exercises, social media class assignments, and lesson plans. It contains a social media syllabus with all of these assignments and activities integrate into it.
Each chapter builds upon the preceding chapter. Thus, the social media exercises and lessons in one chapter teach students skills that they apply in later chapters in new exercises and assignments.
What Makes This Book Unique
The book is not a textbook and it is not a workbook. It is written in a ‘how to’ style. It is built around the What, Why, How, Do, Reflect (WWHDR) framework that I wrote about earlier this year. The book contains chapter appendixes with assignments and activities that you can use in the classroom. The book also contains access to digital copies of these assignments and activities.
Several friends and colleagues encouraged me to write a book at the 2018 AEJMC. The problem is that these very friends and colleagues – Carolyn Mae Kim, Karen Freberg, and Keith Quesenberry – have already written stellar social media textbooks (I’ve discussed Dr. Kim’s textbook here and the accompanying workbook for Dr. Freberg’s textbook here). I knew I wanted to contribute in a different way, but I wasn’t sure how.
So I talked to several folks and thought about what it is I could contribute to the conversation about preparing students for careers as professional communicators today. I evaluated my strengths and my passions. I knew I wanted to write something that was true to the mission of this blog. I also knew I wanted to write something different than I had ever read before.
- Textbooks are for students but we faculty read them to learn and prepare our classes.
- Education pedagogy books give you advice on how to manage a classroom.
- Workbooks give you assignment that you can use in your classroom.
My book is a little of all three of these genres. I wanted to tell the story of how to organize and execute an entire class. This blog, after all, has mostly been about social media assignments and activities. My Google Analytics data tells me that the posts I write about assignments and activities are the most popular. But blogs, as a medium, are limited. Blog articles are single units. At best, they can be strung into series – which I’ve done quite a bit of. But writing blog posts about disparate assignments cannot bring together the meta-organization that goes into planning a class.
Teach Social Media seeks to accomplish what could not be accomplished on this blog. It combines my obsession with organization, detailed assignment plans, and well-planned classes with a broader vision that can only be accomplished with the length and freedom a book offers.
While some of the content in Teach Social Media has been touched upon on this blog, most of it hasn’t. Further, I’ve never publicly organized my social media assignments and activities together in a systematic way that explains how to plan and execute an entire class.
There are two ways to use my book:
- Follow the book as an end-to-end guide for teaching your class. You will find that the book is designed around a social media project that spans the entire semester. All of the topics, assignments and activities in this book are integrated into a social media project and therefore each chapter (and each assignment) builds upon the chapter before it. If you follow this approach, you will want to read the entire book before starting to plan your class.
- Picking and choosing assignments and activities to integrate into your existing class. Call this the à la carte approach. You don’t need to build your class around the semester project to apply the information in the book. Pick what works for you.
Thank you for your support over the years. Thank you so very much to all of the people who have cheered me along over the last many months as I worked through drafts of this book. I want to thank Brad Hamann, the designer of my book’s cover. I also want to thank the Shepherd University Foundation for providing financial support this summer – support that made this book possible.
I hope that Teach Social Media is like no other book you’ve read! Most importantly, I hope that you enjoy it and find it helpful. For me, this is a dream come true!
The book’s table of contents and a sample chapter (appendix not included) are available below. Note that the document will say “error! page not defined” for the table of contents because the sections have been redacted as this is only a sample chapter.
UPDATE: January 27, 2020: Review of Teach Social Media
The Journal of Public Relations Education has published a review of of Teach Social Media in Volume 6, Issue 1. This review is written by Natalie Tindall.
UPDATE: January 14, 2022:
Unfortunately, Amazon no longer allows the ability to include access to the eBook version of the book for free along with purchase of the paperback version. I am sorry about this. If you purchased a new copy of the paperback book during the time period in which language in the book stated that access to the eBook version was included of the paperback book, please contact me with a photo copy of page 2 of your copy of the book so that I may address this issue for you.