HOW TO PARTICIPATE

1.  Discuss the importance of civic action with your students on or before March 15, 2012.

2.  Invite students to draft a letter to President Obama about an issue they care about or an issue you have studied in class.

3.  Revise letters with students with a focus on tailoring their message to their audience.

4.  Have students or a teacher email their letters to dmpstudent.civil@blogger.com. Simply paste the letter into the body of the email. Use the subject line to tag the post for its content (i.e. Climate Change or Unemployment). To ensure privacy, ask students to sign their letters with their first name only. They may also include the name of their school and city and state.

 ***To send an email directly to the White House, have students paste their letters into this FORM and click the box "Contact Me" to ensure the message is read and not archived. The correspondence volunteers and interns at the White House will read these letters, categorize them, and send a sampling of all letters received to President Obama to read at the end of the day.

5. Students who have Twitter and Facebook accounts may choose to post a link to their letter to share with their social network. Simply have them click the sharing badges below their post. See the following tips for posting to Twitter:

• Tweets may only contain 140 characters. It may be prudent to allow students to abbreviate using text-speak. They will know how to do this.
• Tweet directly to @BarackObama and @DMPStudent and @JonCarson44, the Director of Public Engagement for the White House.
• Use the hashtags #DearMrPresident to make the tweet searchable on Twitter.
• To shorten the URL link to the letter, copy and paste it into http://bitly.com/ and then copy and paste the shortened URL into the tweet.

6.  Encourage students to re-visit Dear Mr. President to read letters from other students across the country. Also ask students to monitor the activity of #DearMrPresident on Twitter. It just might become a national trend!