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C O M M U N I C AT I N G A N D C O N N E C T I N G W I T H S O C I A L M E D I A
designated page on the Internet. Tweets often point viewers to other web-based resources, providing principals with the means to deliver real-time school information in a matter of seconds.
Imagine using Twitter to immediately communicate the following to stakeholders. •• Calendar reminders: The school year is full of important dates. Twitter can be used to remind parents and students of athletic and performance schedules, standardized testing dates, end of marking periods, upcoming holidays, and school closings. •• Celebrations: The school year is also full of accomplishments. Sadly, publicly celebrating the successes of students and teachers can be hard to do in a timely fashion. Twitter allows immediate announcements of great achievements to the entire community. •• Helpful resources: Most parents would be happy to extend learning beyond the school day Figure 1.1: Sample Twitter stream. if they had the knowledge and skills needed to support their children. With Twitter, it’s easy to share links to valuable web-based resources on parenting, teaching, or the content being studied in your classrooms. •• Decisions and details: Schools and the organizations that support them are constantly making decisions with far-reaching implications. Boards of education pass new grading or promotion standards, parent-teacher organizations sponsor after-school programs or grade-level field trips, and booster clubs and educational foundations fund scholarships for struggling students. Using Twitter to share these decisions spreads information quickly and makes the inner workings of your organization transparent to everyone. •• Emergency updates: While principals never want to imagine scenarios for dealing with school-based emergencies, planning communication patterns before natural disasters or human tragedies strike is a responsible practice. Because Twitter updates can be posted from mobile devices, they can become a part of a comprehensive plan for easing community fears and getting messages out to parents and support professionals in emergency situations.
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Since each tweet is limited to 140 characters—the average length of one well-written sentence— messages are easy to generate for busy administrators. More importantly, updates to a school’s Twitter website—commonly called a Twitter stream—can be made from any device that has access to the Internet, enabling on-the-go communication. (See figure 1.1 for a visual.) Principals using Twitter can always craft messages from traditional locations like their offices, but with cell phones, PDAs, or Internet-connected mobile devices, they can also begin messaging from the sidelines of the homecoming game, the back row of the band’s first concert, or the table with the winning entry in the school’s science fair.