I saw a need among my students as they went through college. Without much financial support, they needed a way to supplement their income and they love social media, as such, I was trying to introduce Steemit to them. You can read all about it in this post.
After meeting my students and shilling Steemit to them, some of them went away pretty impressed. It has been a few weeks since that meeting and despite some very positive response, starting has been difficult for them. The problem that my students faced was that the students have some really mean competition in the form of college assignments.
The Problem
College life seems to be getting tougher and tougher. It seems as if the powers that be have decided that 'more means good' and have thus gone on to pile more and more tasks on the students. As pumped up as my students were, a lot of them were unable to write their first post as they were only able to finish their classes at 10pm almost on a daily basis.
As much as I would love to encourage them to write about how busy they are, it just did not seem wise to add on more tasks on them. The last thing I want is to make Steemit seem like a chore to them. Many of them are stressed out with the mountain of written assignment given to them. As such, I don't want mine to be one of them as well. This, right here is one of the problems I find when encouraging some of my students to use Steemit.
Furthermore, many of them seem to have problems starting off with their first post. It can be daunting and I do remember the first time when I had to spend hours thinking of what to write for my very first post. Thus, I had to think about ways in which I could help them.
The Support
A Whatsapp group has been created to provide the students with support and encouragement. The group has also been used to organize events and meetups to discuss how to go about posting on Steemit. Thus far, the next meet-up will be before the semester end, after all the exams and crazy written tasks. At the very least, they will be pretty good at writing on Steemit.
One of the other issues the students needed help with is with formatting their post. As such, I created a generic formatted sample post. The file is provided in .txt format and had some guidance on how to write and format the post with markdown formats that they could easily copy and paste.
I would encourage my students to use markdown and create a post with all the formatting completed and done for them. The file is readily shared on the group and all the students have to do, is to take the post I provide, paste their own content into the formatting provided. That way, this saves the students time on having to learn markdown and it reduces the anxiety they may have posting their first post on Steemit.
In addition, I have also used examples of my post to help give them an idea of how to create their first post. That being said, I did warn them of cheetah and steemcleaners.
Looking Ahead
Encouraging, helping and getting my students to write their first post has been a challenge. I suppose many of them do not see the benefits yet to necessitate any urge to post quickly. It is my hope that they will start off by writing their first post, connect with the local Steemit community and better spend their time on a social media platform that rewards their content. Time, after all is precious and their creativity on Facebook and Instagram should be rewarded on the Steemit blockchain instead.
In addition, I am looking forward to forming a local community that can bring more education projects to fruition with the power of Steemit. Hopefully, in the near future, this community will continue to grow and most importantly produce great content that are educational.