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Young people love learning in their free time, and social media (particularly YouTube and TikTok) facilitates this.
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Person A: In my free time, I’ve decided to teach myself how to become a first aider. How I do this is through YouTube. There are plenty of videos from St. John’s Ambulance.
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Person B: I’ve learned so much stuff off TikTok. That’s not necessarily like specific skills, but it’s stuff about the world, about social theory.
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Person C: There are quite a few things that I have learned through TikTok. Sometimes on the ‘For You’ page there are some self-defence videos that come up on how to defend yourself, so that’s quite useful.
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Person D: I have used TikTok to find out how to make certain clothes or designs, because there are loads of people on TikTok that are like really skilled with their hands.
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Person C: Also, I feel like watching lives and people debating, you also gain knowledge as well.
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Person E: I have used various YouTube and Facebook tutorials to teach myself things. For example, cooking and baking skills and also arts and craft skills.
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Person B: I’ve learnt a lot about filmmaking from reading and from YouTube and photography as well, which are two skills that I’m pursuing.
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Person C: I’ve also taught myself using YouTube to learn how to beatbox, which was quite cool.
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Person B: I also use my independent time to learn like crafty things, like jewellery making and weaving and random stuff like that.
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Person A: And the reason they’ve been so beneficial is because they’re visual, they’re shorter, and they’re easier to understand, showing you steps of exactly what you need to do to accomplish the goal of what you’re trying to learn.
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With so much content available online, learning opportunities are vast. But one desirable skill stands out more than most…
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Person D: I am learning Mandarin right now so I use Duolingo, I use LingoDeer, YouTube (where I watch movies in Mandarin now).
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Person E: I have been teaching myself Spanish. I’ve taken classes in private, but now from using various resources online to teach myself.
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Person F: I use my free time to learn a language. I use Rosetta Stone.
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Person C: So, I’ve actually used YouTube and apps like DuoLingo to teach myself a bit of German.
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The app DuoLingo is a popular choice for learning languages.
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Person G: Personally, DuoLingo’s probably my favourite, because of the way it makes learning a language so easy by breaking it down to these tiny little steps, making games into it, making the process so enjoyable when normally it’s such a tedious and repetitive process.
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Person C: I’ve used the DuoLingo app. It’s especially quite enjoyable because you can see the progress you make over time, so there’s a sense of achievement as you kind of level up through the different ranks.
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Similarly, life skills such as coding (which enhance future career prospects) are also important…
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Person D: I also tried to teach myself coding. The basic stuff like CSS, HTML, Javascript.
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Person A: I would love to do more self-learning, particularly around the topics of technology; coding, anything to do with cryptocurrencies, anything that is generally in the news today.
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Person C: For me personally, I think learning to code and becoming more professional at coding, would be something useful and something that I’d want to do.
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Person G: I do stuff on Udemy, courses on there about things like stock learning, stock finances.
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Person C: It would especially be useful for employability purposes.
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Person H: I would like to do more independent learning to enhance my future job prospects, so in areas such as business.
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Person D: I’ve really loved watching TikToks of people with small businesses on how they started off learning something new and now, all of a sudden, it’s like a 5-figure business or 6-figure business. So, it would just be really good to be able to create something for myself and save money in that way.
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Find out what this means for the future of your business.
Talk to our youth researchers.
