Posts filed under ‘Tweens’
Sharing BrdsNBz Success at 2012 SexTech Conference, April 1-4
The 2012 Sex::Tech Conference is enjoying it’s fourth year and we’ve been chosen to speak on a panel including not only APPCNC but also Deb Levin, SexTech founder, and Jonathan Holly from Educational Messaging Services.
OneSeventeen’s public-private partnership with the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina (APPCNC) will share the success as the first text messaging service for sexual health education. Kennon Jackson, Jr. (APPCNC) and Jessica Fitts Willoughby will discuss “Adolescents’ Questions about Pregnancy Posed to an Interactive Text Message Service.”
Just in case you’re in SF and attending SexTech, be sure to stop by and hear Kennon and Jessica. Here’s a brief abstract of their panel discussion:
Want to know what questions adolescents really have about what leads to pregnancy? We examined the questions asked of a sexual health text messaging service promoted to North Carolina teens ages 14 to 19. BrdsNBz North Carolina allows adolescents to text a question to the service and receive a personalized response within 24 hours from trained health educators. Adolescents had a number of questions about pregnancy, mainly what situations can lead to pregnancy (60%). They wanted to know whether anal sex and oral sex could lead to pregnancy, if having sex when a girl is on her period could lead to pregnancy, and if having sex underwater could lead to pregnancy. Adolescents also often wanted to know how to detect and prevent pregnancy. Knowing what questions adolescents have may help health educators address them before they come up. Come find out what teens really want to know about pregnancy.
City of Austin Launches New Programs for Parents and Teens
The Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign (APPCNC) in Durham, NC has coordinated with officials in Austin, Texas the launch of the nation’s first personalized text-and-answer services specifically for parents and teens. A product of its public-private partnership, BrdsNBz National is APPCNC’s successful expansion of its North Carolina service over the past three years. This initiative is in conjunction with Houston-based OneSeventeen Media, the Austin City Health Department and the Austin Healthy Adolescent Initiative (AHA).
APPCNC caught the attention of public health officials nationwide with the launch of their BrdsNBz Text Message Warm Line in February 2009. The BrdsNBz service supplements the work of parents, educators, and medical professionals by providing North Carolina youth a medically accurate, personalized answer to teens’ sexual health and relationship questions.
AHA is an interagency collaborative that will ensure the overall health and well-being of all adolescents, 10-18 years of age, in Austin/Travis County and their adult caregivers to prepare them with a strong foundation for adult life. The Initiative uses a comprehensive evidence-based approach to increase healthy behaviors and decision-making among Texas adolescents by promoting the development of confidence, competence, connectedness, character, and contribution.
College Application Time – ‘Tis the Season
This year Stanford admitted only 7.2 percent of applicants and Harvard accepted only 6.9 percent of them. The process seems daunting. At Harvard, before kids even get to the essay questions, they need to circle whether their career, academic, and athletic plans are “very likely to change” or “absolutely certain.” Then they’ve got the 250-words-or-more Common Application essay. (One suggested topic: “Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you.” Yikes.) And many schools add on “optional” essays.
Writing a college application essay can be pretty stressful, and it should be time-consuming. After all, you don’t want to give the admissions counselors at your dream school a bad impression based on a poorly written essay that you threw together the night before the due date. Proper planning is essential because you will need to give yourself plenty of time for adjustments, rewrites, and proofreading.
Here’s a guide to some ways you can use to help you through this rite of passage:
Be Yourself. “Applications are best if they reflect the way the student is,” says Light. “It’s very tempting to sit down and try to figure out what admissions officers — we as a species — want to see, and there are perils in that.” Why? “We have pretty good radar to detect the overly varnished,” says Keith Light, who has worked in admissions at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and now at Brown. “It’s not that we’re cynical and looking for cheating or too much input. [But] it’s not very hard for us to spot when a parent or someone else [like a teacher] has had too much of a heavy hand in the writing.” It makes admissions officers wonder, “Are we really getting to really know the student, or what others thinks the student is?” he says. It’s best when students pen their own essays, which sound 
as though they’re written by the person their teachers are describing in their recommendation letters.
Once it’s time to begin writing your essay for real, you’ll have a notebook full of ideas from which to choose. Go through your notes and see if anything seems worthy of using; you can even choose two or three topics as “maybes” and narrow things down as you go.
Decide which essay topic you are going to use, and begin by writing an outline. Even though you may have been told otherwise, your admissions essay doesn’t have to be about something that no one else has ever done. While it’s important that your essay is unique and talks about you, most high school students go through similar experiences … and you don’t want to create an essay full of lies, remember?
Once you begin writing, you’ll probably realize that the experience isn’t as bad as you’d imagined it would be. Just remember that the purpose of writing this essay is to present a personal view of you to the college admissions staff. If the school does not require in-person interviews, your essay may be all they have to go on. Take your time and allow others to read your essay and provide constructive criticism before you turn it in.
Don’t underestimate yourself. Keep your attitude positive. Most kids don’t go to Harvard — but still get into a college and love it. This fall about 7.5 million students are expected to attend public four-year institutions and 4.6
million to attend private four-year institutions, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. (There are more than 420 public colleges and universities alone, according to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.)
Don’t feel compelled to add extras, such as resumes. “We neither ask for or expect them, but they pop up,” says Light. (Some even include “mission statements.”) Light once received a 12-page one. The parent told him, “The son of my friend down the street just got admitted to Harvard last year, and his resume was 14 pages.” Light’s take on it: “He was admitted in spite of the essay.” (Resumes aren’t the only add-ons: Once Light received multiple copies of a color-coded family tree, dating back to the 1800s, which showed close relatives’ connections to a university.)
Follow the essay guidelines that were specified on your application. You don’t want it to be too short or too long. Most schools allow typed essays, so they will probably have specifications for font size and spacing; others will request hand-written essays, so be sure to submit your essay in the format that is required. Read your directions carefully.
Remember to proofread your essay. Check your work carefully for grammar, spelling, and structure. Ask others to proofread it, too – your English teacher is a great choice for this job, if they’re willing to help you out, as well as your friends and family. An essay that is full of typos and grammatical errors will look sloppy and rushed and will reflect poorly on you.
Save your essay. It’s fine to use the same essay with minor revisions for more than one college application, so be sure to save your essay. Keep it on the hard drive of your computer, but burn it to CD or place it on an external hard as well. You never know when your computer may crash and cause you to lose everything. You can even email it to yourself as an attachment.
Good luck!
The Bullies and the Bullied – A National Epidemic
The study of the “Ethics of American Youth” released Tuesday surveyed more than 40,000 high school students. The survey reported that half of all high school students say they have bullied someone in the past year, with nearly as many saying they have been the victims of bullying.
A study by the non-profit Josephson Institute of Ethics also found that one-third of all high school students say that violence is a big problem at their school, and nearly one in four say they do not feel very safe there.
The issue of harassment gained prominence this year after a spate of suicides by students who were being bullied. President Obama has even stepped forward, calling for greater awareness of the bullying epidemic, saying the nation must “dispel the myth that bullying is just a normal rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up.”
This past Tuesday also featured The U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, holding a national press conference announcing guidance to schools on handling bullying and discriminatory harassment.
Earlier this month, Duncan released a statement about anti-gay bullying in response to to a trend of recent suicides — particularly Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman who took his life in September:
“This is a moment where every one of us — parents, teachers, students, elected officials, and all people of conscience —needs to stand up and speak out against intolerance in all its forms. Whether it’s students harassing other students because of ethnicity, disability or religion; or an adult, public official harassing the President of the University of Michigan student body because he is gay, it is time we as a country said enough. No more. This must stop.”
Duncan’s statements and planned press conference also comes at the time that the local story of Cassandra Morris was published. Morris dropped out of Ogemaw Heights High School earlier this month because she said she couldn’t handle the bullying from students for being a lesbian. Her bullying went beyond the walls of the school.
So with all these cries for justice, cries for help, occurring this week, the question remains: will something actually be done? Bullying is a crisis that is always discussed, but never really tackled. Maybe now that the harsh spotlight of the media is highlighting every painful angle progress might actually be made? The White House has even gone as far as to say that it would host a conference next year on preventing bullying and harassment. But is this soon enough?
Arrr… Official Talk Like A Pirate Day
Avast, me hearties! Once a goofy idea celebrated by a handful of friends, “Talk Like A Pirate Day” has turned into an international phenomenon that shows no sign of letting up. From South Africa to the South Pole, from New York to the Pacific Northwest, everyone now has their own personal excuse to party like pirates every September 19th.
How It All Began
Once upon a time, in June 6, 1995, to be precise, John Baur and Mark Summers came up with this idea over a game of racquetball – they were not playing very well. Their calls of friendly encouragement to each other quickly turned into pirate slang: they are still not entirely sure how it all started. Anyway, whoever let out the first “Arrr!” started something. One thing led to another. “That be a fine cannonade,” one said, to be followed by “Now watch as I fire a broadside straight into your yardarm!” and other such helpful phrases.
After their hour on the court was over, they realized that lapsing into pirate lingo had made the game more fun and the time pass more quickly. They decided then and there that what the world really needed was a new national holiday, Talk Like A Pirate Day. Since then, for seven years the two celebrated Talk Like a Pirate Day pretty much on their own with a few friends. This particular day of pirate slang, however, might have remained virtually unknown if it had not been for one happy accident. One day in early 2002, John Baur chanced upon Dave Barry’s e-mail address. Dave Barry is a syndicated columnist, Pulitzer Prize winning author, and humorist.
After contacting him, John Baur and Mark Summers assumed a famous guy like Dave Barry would have more important things to do than read the e-mail of a couple of goofy guys with a hare-brained idea. It turns out, it was perfect material for his column and the idea exploded. Chat rooms all over the Web have been deluged with “Arrs” and “me hearties” and such. Radio stations were abuzz with the story and the two even interviewed with NPR’s All Things Considered. They tapped into something big, much bigger than anyone had ever anticipated: the world was finally introduced to Talk Like A Pirate Day.
What’s The Point?
The point is, there is no point: and that is what’s fun about Talk Like a Pirate Day specifically, and talking like a pirate in general. It gives your conversation a swagger, an elán, denied to landlocked lubbers and the like. The silliness is the holiday’s best selling point and embraces the mere image of swaggering pirateness. So when Sept. 19 rolls around and suddenly tens of thousands of people are saying “arrr” and “Weigh anchor or I’ll keelhaul the lot of you,” it staggers us. They are talking like pirates — not because two guys from the Northwestern United States told them to, but simply because it’s fun.
Basic Pirate Speak
Pirate lingo is rich and complicated. There are several sites online that offer glossaries of vernacular that will assist any aspiring pirate. But if you just want a quick reference, a “pirate patina,” if you will, here are the five basic words that you cannot live without. Master them, and you can face Talk Like a Pirate Day with a smile on your face, a swagger in your step, and a parrot on your shoulder.
Ahoy! – “Hello!”
Avast! - Stop and give attention. It can be used in a sense of surprise, “Whoa! Get a load of that!” which today makes it more of a “Check it out” or “No way!”
Aye! – “Why yes, I agree most heartily with everything you just said or did.”
Aye aye! – “I’ll get right on that sir, as soon as I adjust the hook.”
Arrr! – This one is often confused with arrrgh, which is of course the sound you make when you sit on a belaying pin. “Arrr!” can mean, variously, “yes,” “I agree,” “I’m happy,” ” “My team is going to win it all,” and “That was a clever remark you or I just made.” And those are just a few of the myriad possibilities of Arrr!
So be sure to enjoy Talk Like A Pirate Day this September 19th, and embrace the silliness. And be sure to follow the piratical John Baur and Mark Summers on their Facebook Fan Page – more than 15,000 fans strong – complete with a live feed of The Poopdeck newsletter. Or check them out on Twitter under “thecapnslappy“.
Stand Up To Cancer Strikes a Cord with Teens
Did you know that 1 in 2 men and 1 out of three women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes. In fact, there’s not a person that exists that has not been affected in some way by cancer. Stand Up To Cancer ‘s one-hour, commercial-free telecast aired on Friday, September 10, 2010 on over a dozen channels and over 30 online streaming partners like AOL, Yahoo! and YouTube. The SU2C broadcast was dedicated to the over 12 million U.S. cancer survivors illustrating how groundbreaking research can change the tide in the fight against the disease. Since 2008, Stand Up To Cancer has raised more than $100 million for cancer research.
The all-star line-up of presenters, performers and phone operators who gave up their time to help raise funds for cancer research charities and awareness about the killer disease included teen stars Naya Rivera, Vanessa Hudgens, Brenda Song, and Logan Lerman. The goal is to raise awareness and funds for research but, more importantly, to inspire, inform, and support young adults face to face with cancer and build an understanding of what is happening to them and their family; acknowledging the sense of uncertainty and introduce healthy ways of dealing with feelings and changes.
Many teens are at a time in their lives when they are trying to break away and be independent from their parents. When a parent has cancer, breaking away can be hard for them to do. They may become angry, act out, or get into trouble.
Trying to get teens to talk about their feelings is already difficult. Telling them as much as they want to know about cancer is a start. Asking their opinions and, if possible, letting them help make decisions is also helpful.
Teens may want to talk with other people in their lives. Friends can be a great source of support, especially those who also have serious illness in their family. Other family members, teachers, coaches, and spiritual leaders can also help. Encouraging teenage children to talk about their fears and feelings with people they trust and feel close to is essential. Some towns even have support groups for teens whose parents/family members have cancer.
Stand Up To Cancer raises funds to hasten the pace of groundbreaking translational research that can get new therapies to patients quickly and save lives. The show is over but Stand Up To Cancer is still accepting donations online at http://www.su2c.org. 100% of the funds received from the public go to research.
Teens Are Speechless When It Comes to Technology – But Is That Such A Bad Thing?
Not long ago, prattling away on the phone was as much a teenage rite as hanging out at the mall. Flopped on the bed, you yakked into your pink or football-shaped receiver until your parents hollered at you to get off. Today’s teens, however, prefer their Sidekicks and their Blackberries and their Razor phones, not to talk, but to text.
They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.
Daily text messaging among teens has increased from 38 percent of teens texting friends daily in 2008, to 54 percent of teens texting daily in 2009. The average teen sends and receives 50 or more messages per day, or 1,500 per month, according to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Boys typically send and receive 30 texts a day while girls send and receive 80 messages per day. Older girls are the most active texters, with 14-17 year old girls sending 100 or more messages a day or more than 3,000 texts a month.
All this texting is making employers and communications experts anxious: This generation may be technologically savvier than their bosses, but will they be able to have a professional discussion?
“We are losing very natural, human, instinctive skills that we used to be really good at,” says Sonya Hamlin, author of How to Talk So People Listen: Connecting in Today’s Workplace.
A couple of years ago, Hamlin was asked to teach a class of “very bright” California high school seniors about the college admissions interview. Their mock answers were “extremely short and not informational. Nothing came out, really, because it’s such an unused skill.”
So are today’s teens losing their verbal communication skills?
Part of the reason, Hamlin says, is because “they’re not listening. With IM, you can reread six times before deciding how to answer.” There’s no improvisation, she says, none of the spontaneity of phone banter or a face-to-face chat. “Talk is a euphemism. We do it now in quotes,” Hamlin says.
And when face-to-face chats do occur, there are other verbal kinks. Stefani Beser, a freshman at Villa Julie College near Baltimore, texts so much — 20-40 times a day “if there’s a lot going on” — that the shorthand creeps into her live conversation. “You’ll be talking and all of sudden you’ll say, ‘Oh, LOL or OMG,’ ” text-speak for “laughing out loud” and “Oh My Goodness”.
But has all this texting improved the amount of communication overall?
Back home, teens text their moms regularly telling them where they are. Teachers send reminders about class projects and homework. Boyfriends and girlfriends even court each other through Facebook and then IM to get to know each other better via a digital relationship:
The primacy of the keyboard has been, well, a lifeline to the kind of guys who, a generation ago, grasped the family room receiver with a sweaty palm and a pounding heart. IM “makes life easier, absolutely,” says Nick Kacher, 17, a junior from Waltham, Mass. “I’m not a big sit-around-and-chat-on-the-phone kind of person.” Friends, and girlfriends, would needle him about his phone phobia. Now, with IM, “I definitely do chat.”
In the meanwhile, phone companies are tapping into teens’ tapping tendencies. Virgin Mobile unveiled its Switch Back, a kind of junior BlackBerry with a qwerty keyboard and AOL IM built in. “We really think that text is the new talk,” the company’s Howard Handler says. A quarter of Virgin Mobile’s teen customers use their phones for texting more than talking. “We are living in a 160-character nation,” the maximum text message length, Handler declares. Today most cell phone plans include a Media Package focused on texting rather than phone minutes.
So is texting a helping teens socially, or limiting them? These two schools of thought will play out in this new generation of young texters while our daily lives and vocabulary picks up more SMS language, (Short Message Service text slang), on a regular basis.
Creating the Perfect PSA
What do you want the world to know? That’s the central question asked when you are creating a public service announcement (PSA), which is any message promoting programs, activities or services of federal, state or local governments or the programs, activities or services of non-profit organizations.
Often in the form of commercials and print ads, PSAs are created to persuade an audience to take a favorable action. PSAs can create awareness, show the importance of a problem or issue, convey information, or promote a behavioral change. Whether you have a cause of your own or you are an educator, PSAs create a forum for learners to actively participate in a project that allows them to become stewards of — and advocates for — social change.
PSAs came into being with the entry of the United States into World War II. Radio broadcasters and advertising agencies created a council that offered their skills and facilities to the war effort, creating messages such as, “Loose lips sink ships,” “Keep ‘em Rolling” and a variety of exhortations to buy War Bonds.
Today that same council, the Advertising Council, now serves as a facilitating agency and clearing house for nationwide campaigns that have become a familiar part of daily life. “Smokey the Bear” was invented by the Ad Council to personify its “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires” campaign; “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste” raised millions for the United Negro College Fund; the American Cancer Society’s “Fight Cancer with a Checkup and a Check” raised public awareness as well as funds for research and patient services.
Yet the most recognized PSA consisted of only an egg, a frying pan and these 15 words: “This is your brain. This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”
This PSA, created in 1987, went on to be named one of the top one hundred television advertisements of all time. Its message could be seen printed on t-shirts, being parodied on television and in films, and it even spun a sequel nearly a decade later staring actress, Rachel Lee Cook. This only goes to show the massive impact PSAs have on our culture and our society. You can make an impact too!
Getting Started
- Choose your topic. Pick a subject that is important to you, as well as one you can visualize. Keep your focus narrow and to the point. More than one idea confuses your audience, so have one main idea per PSA.
- Time for some research – you need to know your stuff! Try to get the most current and up to date facts on your topic. Statistics and references can add to a PSA. You want to be convincing and accurate.
- Consider your audience. Are you targeting parents, teens, teachers or some other social group? Consider your target audience’s needs, preferences, as well as the things that might turn them off. They are the ones you want to rally to action. The action suggested by the PSA can be almost anything. It can be spelled out or implied in your PSA, just make sure that message is clear.
- Grab your audience’s attention. You might use visual effects, an emotional response, humor, or surprise to catch your target audience. Be careful, however, of using scare tactics. Attention getters are needed, but they must be carefully selected. For example, when filming a PSA about controlling anger, a glass-framed picture of a family can be shattered on camera. This was dramatic, but not melodramatic. Staging a scene between two angry people to convey the same idea is more difficult to do effectively.
- Create a script and keep your script to a few simple statements. A 30-second PSA will typically require about 5 to 7 concise assertions. Highlight the major and minor points that you want to make. Be sure the information presented in the PSA is based on up-to-date, accurate research, findings and/or data.
- Storyboard your script.
- Film your footage and edit your PSA.
- Find your audience and get their reaction. How do they respond and is it in the way you expected? Your goal is to call your audience to action. Are they inspired?
Through a Public Service Announcement you can bring your community together around a subject that is important to you. Will your PSA be on education, poverty, drunk driving, or maybe even Haiti disaster relief? For ideas and examples, check out the Ad Council and the Ad Council Gallery. Keep your message clear and simple, and target your intended audience. Take advantage of your interests, and practice important critical thinking and literacy skills because you will be spreading important social, economic, and political topics.
Spread the Word to End the Word
Across the United States and around the globe, young people have joined a movement of mutual respect and human dignity called Spread the Word to End the Word. The goal: get people to stop and think about their hurtful and disparaging use of the word “retard” and pledge to stop using it.
Spread the Word to End the Word was created by youth with and without intellectual disabilities who participated in the Special Olympics Global Youth Activation Summit at the 2009 Special Olympics World Winter Games. The motivation for the campaign was driven by a united passion to promote the positive contributions people with intellectual disabilities make to communities around the world combined with a simple call to action – a pledge to stop using a word – that also symbolizes positive attitude change and a commitment to make the world a more accepting place for all people.
We found that almost all youth have heard the r-word and most have heard it used by a friend or a student at school. We also found that youth react differently to the r-word if it is directed at a person with a disability or if a friend says the word.
Half of youth (51%) said that they felt bad or sorry for the person being picked. Some responded that they either laughed or didn’t care when they heard the r-word and many (39%) said that they did nothing. Some youth (33%) took a stand and told the person it was wrong to say the r-word.
What YOU Can Do
Join he cause and the Spread the Word to End the Word’s Project UNIFY movement in schools around the U.S. Motivate your friends to get involved with a variety of fun youth activities. You can even contribute five minutes to take the Spread the Word to End the Word pledge.
Get in the game by joining Special Olympics Unified Sports®, where people with and without intellectual disabilities train and compete together on the same team.
Know someone with an intellectual disability? Refer them to a Special Olympics program nearby, and for more information, go to http://www.specialolympics.org/.
19 Days and Counting
Only 19 days left to register for the Young Minds Digital Times Student Film Competition. We have fantastic prizes for our winners, including two Grand Prize packages to attend the 2011 South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. Other first place category winners will take home $200 in cold, hard cash. The teacher with the most student film entries, and the school with the most student film entries in Track One: Young Filmmakers Doing Good, will each win $1000! But you have to register first!!
Registration is open until February 19th. The competition is free to all student filmmakers grades 6-8 and 9-12. Film entries are due March 19th. And check the rest of our blog posts for filmmaking tips and tricks.
