Being Me: School-wide, online social database

Overview
Being Me is an online social network and integrated wellness curriculum designed for faculty and students at Quest to Learn (Q2L), which launched in February 2010. Designed to support the digital lives of young people and their capacity for learning, Q2L is dedicated to graduating strong, engaged, literate citizens of a networked world. In order to help kids prepare for this future, student identity is a core value of the school. Being Me supports this value in providing a long-term space for students to document, explore, and “take on” a range of identities within a connected community of practice. The space is designed to help move kids from identities as social selves to identities as learner selves, and to help kids discover what it is that they are interested in doing, thinking about, and being.

Being Me’s online presence is made up of a system of interrelated parts: The Studio, an interactive portfolio space where students can display and store media and other digital materials; the Expertise Exchange, a hub of interaction where students subcontract their expertise to other kids or locate peers or mentors with expertise they need; Mission Channels, where students can broadcast their work and share ideas via blogs and audio and video podcasts; a Friend Well, where students can manage their community of peers that links to external social communities in which they are active and the Data Repository, which tracks students statistics within the community, visualizing the activities and issues in which students are engaged.

Being Me’s Being Well Curriculum, consists of a series of wellness quests that support students in holistic work on issues related to emotional, physiological, social, and community development. It is our belief that students must practice and play in order to be able to enact sustainable and healthful identities. The more spaces, communities and contexts that students gain experience in as practitioners of reflective learning about their own lives, the healthier they, and their communities grow. Being Me’s curriculum provides kids with supported opportunities to practice and share their work with mentors and peers, offering students another setting from which to learn.