One of the frequent complaints that I hear about communicating with people online or through text is that it is extremely difficult to communicate tone and mood.  This is very true with text alone and can lead to miscommunication, misunderstandings, and a myriad of other problems.  Thankfully, online and text communication has evolved to give us several options to mitigate this pitfall.  Today I’ll be talking about three of those options.

As teachers, tone is very important in our communication with students, parents, colleagues, and other stockholders.  It helps convey our message to students as we intend it to be received.  As online instructors, this can be a challenge.  However, appropriate use of the following tools can greatly up our chances of communicating clearly with our students.

Tool #1: Emoticons/Emojis 

First of all, what’s the difference between the two?

Emoticons (a shortening of “emotional icons”) are a precursor to emojis.  They consist of punctuation marks and other characters combined to recreate a facial expression or other image.  They’ve been in regular use since about 1982.  Some typical examples include:

Emojis, which were initially based on these images, are small pictographs of faces/symbols/images that can be inserted into text.  They were invented in 1990 in Japan and quickly entered popular use there.  They became popularized worldwide when Apple added an emoji keyboard to their original iPhone in 2007.  While many platforms have their own style of emoji, the most readily recognizable remains Apple’s standard keyboard set.

Both emoticons and emojis serve the same purpose on a surface level, however.  Both are intended to convey emotion or feeling alongside the text, allowing the writer to communicate tone or mood.  Some emojis have taken on specific meanings within the culture as time has passed, but the original intent was to augment text communication and allow for emotional communication.

In practical application, emojis and emoticons can help us communicate tone to our students, to indicate irony, or to personalize our communication and build connections with students.  They can help reduce the distance imposed by the computer and virtual aspect of our instruction. (note: Emoji for Google Chrome is a great extension for making the use of emojis really easy)

Tool #2: Memes 

Internet memes are easily communicable images/phrases/videos or a mixture of these that are spread on the internet, usually with humorous intent.

The term “meme” was actually coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins to describe an idea the spreads throughout and permeates the culture in a sort of “viral” way, all while mutating and changing in a manner comparable to biological evolutionary patterns.  Internet memes are a sort of mutation of that idea (fitting, no?) and have been around as long as the internet itself.  Originally passed around on message boards and in chat rooms, they are now widely spread on social media platforms.

Some of the most enduring memes include a common image that allows variation on a theme.  For example, there are many, many variations on the Woody/Buzz meme used above.  Other examples include Grumpy Cat, Philosoraptor, Overly Attached Girlfriend, and Chubby Bubbles Girl.  Some of the earliest memes included:

Among many, many others.  Many recent memes (like the Woody/Buzz example) take the form of an “image macro” which consists of an image and one or two lines of text based on this template:

There are obviously far too many memes to mention them all here, but the website KnowYourMeme.com is a very useful resource for all things meme-related.

Memes can be used to lighten the mood, insert some humor and visual interest into a text-heavy announcement, and display personality, helping students to get to know you as a person and not just a teacher.

Another strength of memes is that they are easily adaptable to fit the context and subject matter you’re working with.  There’s a whole subset of teacher memes that are always relatable:

And there are lots of memes that have been created for any subject area:

One of my favorite recent trends is taking images from classical art and turning them into memes.

The point is, you can usually find a meme to fit your situation, and if you can’t, you can use tools like memegenerator.net or imagechef.com to create your own!

Tool #3: GIFs 

And now on to the main event!  Many of you may have noticed my affinity for GIFs throughout the past months.  GIF stands for “Graphics Interchange Format” and is pronounced with a hard ‘g’ like ‘gift’ but without the ‘t.’  If you disagree with that, well…

They were invented (partially) by a compuserve employee named Steve Wilhite, who incidentally, also pronounces it wrong, because “graphics” is not pronounced “jraphics” nor is a GIF a brand of peanut butter.

Anyway… basically, a GIF is an animated image, sometimes with a phrase, like a meme (in fact, there’s an argument to be made that a GIF is just a subset of memes, but that’s a discussion for another day) that loops on a time delay.  As with the other tools discussed, they insert a bit of humor and personality and conveniently break up blocks of text.  They’re my preferred format because they’re just so darn fun!  While there are several online tools that allow you to create animated GIFs, websites like GIPHY.com have gathered thousands upon thousands upon thousands of GIFs and organized them in a searchable database for your convenience.  Chances are you can find the perfect GIF for any situation.  In case you can’t, though, GIPHY also allows you to create your own using an on-site tool.

A Word of Warning 

Emojis, memes, and GIFs may seem like a lot of innocent fun, and for the most part, they are!  However, as with everything on the internet, they do have a darker side.  Several emojis carry with them sexual connotations, and there are a few memes, including Pepe the Frog and images of Crusade Knights (Deus Vult) that have recently been associated with radical or racist groups.  GIFs and memes can be created about anything, so care should be taken to make sure the images you’re using are appropriate for students to see.

However, used thoughtfully and appropriately, any of these tools can allow teachers to better communicate with their student and connect with them through that communication.  These are methods our students are using to communicate with their peers and friends and they are methods they understand and appreciate.