If you have kids, you have tackled the age old conversation:
You: "How was school today?"
Child: "Fine."
You: "What did you do?"
Child: "Oh, nothing."
And scene...
This conversation happens often in your families' homes and while for a vast majority the conversation rarely ends there and many vary their questioning strategies (we posted a great article on this a couple days ago) to tease out what REALLY happened that day at school. Left unchecked, though, this conversation can begin to erode our families' view of our
classrooms and campus. It is important to remember in all this talk of branding and identity that learning is our primary focus & purpose and remains the foundation of why we do what we do in all facets of our daily business. It is the thing, along with students, around which our identity and brand should revolve.
In contrast to the information and celebration posts, the curriculum & instruction (C&I) post is probably an active step outside of your original intent and purpose for getting into social media, but should part of the discussion because, as stated above, school is about learning! The C&I post gives a window into the work of school. It is a great opportunity to highlight student work products, great teaching as well as campus instructional initiatives. Here is an example of a recent post:
Happy posting!
B
classrooms and campus. It is important to remember in all this talk of branding and identity that learning is our primary focus & purpose and remains the foundation of why we do what we do in all facets of our daily business. It is the thing, along with students, around which our identity and brand should revolve.
In contrast to the information and celebration posts, the curriculum & instruction (C&I) post is probably an active step outside of your original intent and purpose for getting into social media, but should part of the discussion because, as stated above, school is about learning! The C&I post gives a window into the work of school. It is a great opportunity to highlight student work products, great teaching as well as campus instructional initiatives. Here is an example of a recent post:
As mentioned in the platform post, Instagram is a great tool for this as it allows creativity in the presentation as well as it's ability to integrate with Facebook and Twitter. More often than not, my principal and I use this platform as we are out and about, whether it be for observation visits or specifically out on a "work walk". We'll often catch cool things happening on our Morning Power Walks, too! The key to great C&I posts is always having a device handy and ready (not a problem for me...). There so much high quality learning happening in our classrooms and schools today and the C&I post is a great way to "open the doors" to make sure that we aren't keeping it to ourselves. Let this be a vital part of the ongoing narrative of our schools!
Happy posting!
B
I appreciate how you have categorized your posts on social media to be more intentional about including posts related to teaching and learning. Easy to forget and focus more on celebrations and information (at least for me). Not that you need another tool, but one thing we added to our mix was posting to Instagram with a hashtag (#camlearns) that triggers an automatic blog post on a dedicated wordpress photo blog This is accomplished automatically through an IFTT recipe. You can read how we do it here: http://goo.gl/HzzhaZ
ReplyDeleteThe biggest benefit of this is that anyone who posts to Instagram using the hashtag, will be included on the site and our most social media savvy parents are adding to the narrative.
Love that idea! We already have families using the hashtag #EREPROUD so that is a great next step for us! Do you think we could do the same with the hashtag on Facebook & Twitter?
DeleteI think that would work as well. We use Twitter (though not Facebook - an area we need to explore since so many parents are there) and both staff and parents use the hashtag on Twitter.
ReplyDelete