Social Media / Networking in Schools

[rickypike]

Hi all

 

(Not sure if this topic has been covered before or if its in the right place?)

 

I am the network manager at a state school (currently going through academy conversion).

 

I have been made a core member of a new marketing / PR team and have been tasked with investigating making better use of social media for marketing purposes. I thought Edugeek would be a great place to start just to see what other schools / academies are currently doing.

 

Any info / feedback would be greatly received, thanks in advance.

[DevilsAdvocate]

We have a main Twitter account for the Academy which is run by the Principal. We then have various departmental Twitter pages that are run by teachers. Some teachers have their own 'personal' teacher accounts that they use also. All passwords are known to the school so can be accessed by appropriate people if need be. We've had a few issues in the past with younger members of staff doing daft things via social media, but nothing too bad. It's a useful tool, when monitored correctly.

[visioN]

Twitter feed for stuff like School events, snow days, sporting results, other PR stuff etc

[abillybob]

We find EduModo very useful and give parents a generic login to use so they can view the latest updates for the school, the parents really seem to like it we also find the parents like to go to specific classes their child is in to get updates and news on the latest on what that class is studying.

 

We are also looking to create a Facebook and Twitter account with a news feed that will be directed onto our website for the same purpose on keeping parents updated.

[Danp]

I too working in Marketing as well as IT, we have a twitter and facebook accounts that we use to not only let our current parents know what we are doing but help promote our school in catchment areas that we wish to reach out too.

 

Feel free to PM me if you want any more info etc.

[RichCowell]

We've had a Facebook page and Twitter account for a few years now, and have found it really handy...

 

There are several member of staff that used to ask me to post/tweet things regularly, so I've added them as editors on the Facebook page, and set it to automatically Tweet everything that's posted, so that way Twitter's used just as much as Facebook...

 

I was contacted by another school locally that were interested in starting with Facebook, they decided against it as posts other users made to the page couldn't be reviewed before they went live - but there's now an option for this, so if you're not sure about that, it's easy to enable until you see the sorts of things people are posting...

 

Several departments in school have their own Twitter accounts too (to stop the main one getting flooded with subject-specific stuff all the time) and that works really well too... the only stipulation that we make is that they don't follow the pupils, it's used solely to give information...

 

I'd be happy to discuss it further

[rad]

I'm not sure how much you know about Twitter, before I started the school account my knowledge was limited.

 

We have a twitter account that has been running for a good year or two, set up by an ICT Teacher but the password is known by a few. It is fed to our school website and used as a news item only. With nearly 800 followers after 700 odd tweets we are doing well getting people to link to our account.

 

The twitter account does not follow anyone, it can send a direct message to followers but they cant reply back, this stops us creating a tweet in a reply to a message they tag us in, as a tweet would feed onto our site.

 

Please be careful though if teachers follow the account using their own personal accounts. If for example Sarah Smith who is an ICT teacher follows using her personal account which is not protected, could be trolled by students. If you have a locked down account that is protected (which I did) when I did a "retweet" as part of a company competition, my retweet could not be seen. (I did a test with another account to check this)