My work and digital tools:
I’m currently working as outreach youthworker. It’s essential that I follow applications and social media platforms where there are youth. As part of my work we heavily use different applications to reach out on youth and also use digital tools for information search. Usually it involves searching what social services there are available, or educations or business contact numbers. We also create tasks for youth in digital enviroments. I’ve listed more recent tools that we use in our work, in co-operation with different organisations and youth workers around the country. The idea for below is nothing new, but I think applying it here in Finland is fairly new concept.
Five new tools that I use:
Canvas – is a website or phone application for designing social media posts or marketing adds. It’s also great way to make informational blankets or printable pictures to use in your projects. You can also add your own images / pictures.
Google Lens – is application published by Google. It uses camera on your phone to scan items or objectives and it gives result what that scanned object / item is. It also works in nature and it knows plants and trees as well. As you might’ve guessed, it’s really good in finding different brands and products.
BirdNet – is application designed to scan for bird sounds. It uses microphone of your mobile device to record audio. If it hears sound of a bird, it can recognize what bird it was and also if it was mimicked my human or not. We’ve used this with school groups to get in touch with the nature.
QR-code generating websites, such as: https://www.qr-code-generator.com/
There are a lot of websites to perform same task. The idea is you can build your own website, or maybe google document, onedrive file or whatever that can be linked to internet and make scannable QR-code for that. One example is we’ve build geocaches (glass jars) that have QR-code inside them. If you scan QR-code, it opens up google document with view only access. Then there’s task that you have to perform. I think this same format could also be used for “Escape Room” in type of activities.
Google Documents – Is similiar to application such as Microsoft Words, or Wordpad, or any other text writing application. This is provided by Google. One cool feature with google documents is that you can make effortlessly online documents that can be shared with others. It also gives easier way to share files between different companies that might have strict policies about sharing files or working together on projects. I can highly recommend this in some light activities, especially if you combine this with geocaching or escape room type of activities mentioned above.
Social media and succesful digital applications of it:
To summarise, we had recent success in combining use of above digital tools in a geocache task. It involved going to 4 different geocaches, which each had different task and coordinates to next geocache location that they had to find. After finishing all 4 tasks they would be asked to give summary and did they like it or not. Some groups had mixed feeling but overall most youth liked the process. It involved building team spirit, using digital tools to help and find geocaches and then doing the tasks.
With little more effort, I think this could be applied in a different ways and build some sort of “digital enviroment” and share it via social media platforms to activate youth to get out there outdoors and explore local communities / cities / point of interests.
Self reflection:
With building this page of the blog, I got this overwhelming feeling of sharing this combined way of doing things to make one “large project”. I feel like the information should be available for everyone equally, and not hidden behind, for example, paywalls or only between professionals.
I think with shared informations we could achieve so much more, but often times, information does not get shared too often or it stays within smaller circles. This is why some better practices or applications don’t get shared with larger audience, or it takes long period of time before it becomes more widespread.
From the get go, I wanted to build a blog post that is not done just for the sake of “I’m doing this blog post because I need to, not because I want to” mentality. I do understand however that this blog post will not be widely spread, but I hope it helps those few that reads it. And if it did, please pass it forward. Thank you for reading!