Posts Tagged ‘Text Messaging’
Texting Teen Falls Down Manhole
This just in: A teen in New York City feel down an open manhole while texting. (full story, video)
Reports indicate that workers had stepped away from the manhole for “just seconds” to retrieve orange cones from their truck. In an instant, Alexa Longueira went from walking along the sidewalk to five feet underground!
She suffered minor cuts and bruises but will be just fine. The family is thinking about filing a lawsuit.
Let this be a warning to us all: Beware your surroundings when texting!
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Growing sexting trend and how to respond
With recent studies like this one that found 20% of teens have posted or sent nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves, it’s obvious that sexting is no longer just a fringe occurance.
For those that haven’t heard, sexting is the new term for personal cell phone pornography. Several court cases illustrate how more and more teens are sending nude pictures of themselves to a their boyfriend or girlfriend, only to find that their image has spread like wildfire all over their school and town. Many of them find themselves facing jail time on pornography charges.
Considering how prevelant it is, many teens must still consider this as acceptable behavior. Either the potentially severe consequences, such as criminal charges and extreme embarrasment, are not enough to keep them from doing it, or they just don’t know the consequences!
As one youth pastor reports, this problem is already leaking into youth group meetings, so it’s one we can’t ignore much longer. The study I mentioned earlier has some great tips on how to address it along with videos of teens discussing the issue.
For discussion: Has this issue sexting impacted your group? How did you respond? Have you had a frank discussion with your students about sexting?
One more incredible TXT tool
On my last post about great texting tools for youth ministry, Lex commented about another great way to send announcements to to your teens via text messages, this time for free.
She created a Twitter account for her youth group and then told her students how to sign up for mobile updates. Whenever she posts to the main Twitter account, every student gets a text message! Great for announcements, reminders, and encouragement. And because it’s web-based, parents and other adults who want to stay in the know can just go online to the profile page and see the latest posts.
Ready to do it? Here’s how. To create the youth group Twitter account:
- Go to www.twitter.com.
- Click “Join the conversation!” and follow the steps for creating an account.
Easy right? Now here’s what you need to tell your students to do:
- Start with the same thing you just did–go to www.twitter.com and create an account.
- Once created and logged in, go to “Settings”
- Click on “Devices”
- Follow the steps to add your mobile device (for US phones, in step one, enter “+1″ followed by your area code and number, no spaces).
- Go to the youth group’s main Twitter account (i.e. www.twitter.com/your_twitter_name)
- Click on “Follow”
- Click on “Device Updates Off”
- Click the “On” option
Sound complicated? It might be to us, but 99% of your students already use Twitter daily and could probably do a better job than me explaining how to do this ;)
Give it a try and let me know how it goes!
Two Don’t-Miss YM Resources
- Simply TXT: Send individual or group text messages to your students, parents, or volunteers. This tool seriously blew me away. I’ve been dreaming about being able to create groups and send text messages on the fly, like I do with email now, but I had never seen something that could actually do it. Simply TXT lets you build groups and send messages whenever you like–you can even schedule them in advance–and the pricing is pretty reasonable.
- Poll Everywhere: Create polls and free response questions your students respond to via text message. Results are updated live and can be displayed right on the screen. Another tool I was honestly thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” before I heard about it. Pricing is also very reasonable with a free option for audiences under 30 people.
