Many of us in the K-12 sector are experimenting with how we can use social media to connect with families. We have examples of schools using both Facebook and Twitter to build connections beyond the traditional means of school-home communication.
The challenge of Twitter is that very few parents actually have a Twitter account. I really like what one of our schools has done to get past this issue to find a way to use Twitter, to share school news and build community.
Chartwell Elementary (West Vancouver) has a new principal this year – Aron Campbell. Aron uses social media in his personal and professional life and has found a great way to extend this to what he is doing with his school.
Families want webpages that provide dynamic content; they love current highlights of school activities, and photos (shared conscious of student safety) are a huge draw. Aron has done a great job of this with his use of Twitter on the front page of their website. He can now share activities in real time, with a smartphone and a Twitter account.
The details of the how – our websites are built on SharePoint. Aron has taken a widget from yfrog, which is linked to the school’s Twitter account and this has been added as a webpart on the school site’s front page.
Our school websites were refreshed a year ago with the goal of moving away from the webmaster model, and encouraging more current, relevant content shared in a variety of formats. This example from Chartwell is small, and it is simple – but it is a great example of how we can begin to use social media to build community in our schools.
cultureofyes.ca 
I would add students to the list of not having Twitter accounts, or not using them for much of anything. However, our Sullivan Heights Athletics page, with it’s twitter widget, has slowly been attracting one or two students a day (we intentionally didn’t make it a requirement of anyone) and the community of sport and school pride has been on the rise. With new connections and new uses for their accounts, we are seeing students expand their concepts of learning, teaching, and school engagement. Thanks for posting… looking forward to many more. @bobneuf @teacherneuf
Thanks Ryan for th response. It is interesting to see how schools and districts are trying to use Twitter. While many of us have found Twitter to be an amazing professional development resource, it is still a struggle to see how we use this tool with families and others to share our news.
Nice to connect with you.
Great post Chris. Really appreciate the widget name. We have just been using the feed and it is not very dynamic at all. i will see what I can do with the widget as a webpart.
Mike
Thanks Mike. I am far from being a SharePoint pro, but I believe you can set this up through the content editor web part.
Hmmm – was this tested?
When you activate the widget via the school home page to get more details, directed to http://yfrog.com/20bgwzj and then check out the top pics of the day etc, http://yfrog.com/popular.php you can witness some bad language, “hooters” and racist remarks…this is where “control” over a “free” widget ends. I’m surprised that the district condones this frankly. A few clicks away from what would not be deemed appropriate on a school website. I can appreciate embracing new concepts and am certainly no technophobe, but it seems that the research into what parents/students might easily access via a “school” website is inappropriate.
Mandy you raise a really important point about using free widgets. It is part of a larger issue about our love of free tools in education to support those supplied by the District. We have gone to a core set of tools but through SharePoint one can bring in a variety of other webparts.
Given the nature of the internet, we cannot block all concerning content so we then have a responsibility to educate around content.
I apprecaite the feedback.
Mandy I was also concerned with this aspect, especially as the one pushing the front of the change. My solution was to make the twitter widget reflect only the posts and retweets from my own account. That way, for students and parents to contribute they mention my account name and I decide if it should end up on the website. So far I haven’t had to filter any for poor choices. 🙂
I very much like the fact that we are experimenting with new ways of making connections between school staff – kids – and parents.
However, we need to mindful that many parents [myself included] are of mixed minds about the social media and this influences our willingness to adopt it for ourselves. To illustrate, I have seen SEVERAL high school students staying with us who are literally addicted to facebook; some of whom have asked us to turn off the internet some evenings… We think that for some kids this is a major addiction problem in the making.
Of course, this is not what school tweets is about at all; they are not meant to encourage elementary level kids to use social media; however, when our kids see their parents get increasingly used to using such tools, they will want to do it too. (My 11 year old daughter is pestering her parents to get a facebook account.. “all my friends have one…”).
This conundrum (how can adults responsibly use a potentially addictive tool around their kids) is real and because we are still learning about it, I suspect that many parents are reluctant to start using these great tools.
There are absolutely addiction like behaviours with some young people in connection to Facebook and other social media. My message to parents is that it is really important they understand these tools their children are in. I think parents should get Facebook accounts and play in the tools themselves.
As for your eleven year-old daughter, there are age appropraite places on the internet for her and her friends to play that will help guide them as their devlelop their presence online.
I think parents must act responsibly with social media and be good models for their children. It comes back to the analogy of the telephone for me. I grew up watching my parents use the phone – how to behave on a call, the appropriate way to begin and end a call etc. Once I begun making phone calls, I took what I learned from my parents as a guide for how I would talk on the phone.
Unfortunately young people do not have the same mentors in the virtual world as I did with using the phone so they often just look to their friends. This is the place for families and schools to model appropriate, ethical use of the technoogy.
Thanks for raising some excellent points.
Thanks, very good point – I have been arriving at the same conclusion myself, after thinking about this problem. (We had already initiated a policy of clarifying for our kids (6 and 11) that they are welcome to try wine or beer at home at the table, if they wish – ie, no age restriction but also that we model responsible behaviour. Neither kid wants to try it, but we have at least demystified it and removed it from the “forbidden / adult only” zone.)