Interrupted by a barrage of school-related e-mails, I’ve been thinking of the variety of ways schools could and should embrace social media. Here’s why:
E-mail announcements are a disruption and not effective. Recipients tend to read the e-mails (if at all) when they are recieved, not when they’re ready to devote attention to them. Messages are sometimes blocked, or the content is irrelevant to the recipient.
A better method is to offer RSS feeds for specific communities from the school’s home page. The Football Feed would certainly be popular, but Senior News would eliminate parents of seniors getting extraneous information about underclassmen. Administratively, school blogs save time and money. The administration of e-mail blasts is time consuming and tedious.
Blog posts have the added benefit of being archived and discoverable, eliminating the administration task of collecting and maintaining a cumbersome e-mail list. Missed that note your fifth grader has crumpled at the bottom of her backpack? A post with the information would certainly help Mom and Dad stay on top of school events; and the archive allows readers to go back and review notes they may have missed. Students, parents, educators and administrators will easily find the feeds they’re interested in reading and be able to sign up and unsubscribe to the feeds independently. The school will be able to review the success and popularity of individual feeds, making adjustments where necessary.
Add social networking into the school social media plan and you have teachers and administrators joining groups on Facebook, collaborating across districts, counties and states to share best practices and learn from one another. (Younger teachers, fresh from college, are likely already there.) Teachers networking to find new opportunities will form relationships necessary to do so; administrators looking to boost their popularity and name recognition can network with their constituency, building a group of supporters for their ideas and initiatives.
Blogging administrators and school board members provide great benefit by allowing two-way conversation. Blogging technology affords the conversation that most of these individuals will tell you they don’t have time to engage in. With a blog, administrators can open a topic, share their thoughts and invite comments. In one efficient online space the administrator allows parents, students, taxpayers and others to provide their questions and opinions, thereby giving the administrator the space to respond, correct false or misguided information and get an accurate sense of how they’re doing, professionally. Responding to the question of one in an online format often answers the question of many, giving the administrator back the time they’re not able to spend, having individual conversations with all the members of their constituency.
Blogging teachers have been recieving kudos for the communication channel they’ve opened with students. Posting their experiences with the class helps develop their relationship with students and provides a space for them to post assignments, reminders and other details. The blog replaces the blackboard and is a retrievable resource to which students can refer as often as needed. In addition, students can post their questions for the benefit of the entire class.
Some interesting education blogs:
