School Twitter - Do's and Don'ts?

[foofighterjim]

So I have had a meeting with the Head and a few other key stakeholders this morning and they feel that as a school we are missing a bit of a trick by not having a proper presence on Twitter (or any social medium for that matter). The main objective is to establish better, more frequent dialogue with parents. Being particularly anti-social I have never used Twitter, Facebook, Instagram et al, so I really could do with some advice. Nothing is set in stone but there are a few stumbling blocks that I came up with but don't really know enough about the inner workings of Twitter.

 

One of the things that was mentioned was locking the profile down to just invited people so we could post material that may come under DPA / GDPR (thinking student images with names rather than home addresses etc.). However, my mind immediately turned to how do we know these accounts belong to who they claim to be, this could be resolved by a mass push on the collection of parental Twitter handles but this will take a lot of admin to get right. Do others lock the account down or do you simply not Tweet specifics or student images?

 

Then there was the matter of workload, we would be looking at several people with access to the same account. Are there any potential pitfalls of several people potentially being logged in and Tweeting at the same time on the same account (other than accountability of the posts)?

 

Ultimately I guess I'm asking has your school ever had a Twitter account, is it still widely used, what does your school Tweet about, to whom and how frequently?

 

As always, any help would be greatly appreciated!

[TomHD]

We have a Twitter and its used daily to tweet about school achievements. It has restricted access being the Head, Computing Coordinator, PE Teacher and myself (NM). We would never put more than a first name and perhaps the child's year on there and only with the necessary "school photos being published" waiver signed by parents Edited October 10, 2017 by TomHD

[pooley]

Our school has a twitter account, all staff have the login and basically tweet about anything relevant going on. Only those children who's parents have given permission to use their picture online can be tweeted.

 

The twitter account is open, we found it impossible to police who was allowed to view the profile, parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents etc etc. All staff are aware that what they tweet represents the school, the only time's i've had to get involved is when staff are unsure how to delete a tweet after noticing a spelling or grammatical error.

[TomHD]

all staff have the login

That's brave!

[foofighterjim]

We have a Twitter and its used daily to tweet about school achievements. It has restricted access being the Head, Computing Coordinator, PE Teacher and myself (NM). We would never put more than a first name and perhaps the child's year on there and only with the necessary "school photos being published" waiver signed by parents

 

When you say restricted do you mean that you're the only people who know the credentials to actually login to Twitter?

[hardtailstar]

I would avoid having it locked down and also not to collect twitter accounts from parents/carers etc.

 

Its just like putting information onto the school's website. It needs to represent your school and the values.

[foofighterjim]

Our school has a twitter account, all staff have the login and basically tweet about anything relevant going on. Only those children who's parents have given permission to use their picture online can be tweeted.

 

The twitter account is open, we found it impossible to police who was allowed to view the profile, parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents etc etc. All staff are aware that what they tweet represents the school, the only time's i've had to get involved is when staff are unsure how to delete a tweet after noticing a spelling or grammatical error.

 

Out of interest do you staff have school mobile devices to take said pictures or is it more like here is the picture we have of this student from our MIS?

 

I suspected that locking it down may prove a difficult task, is there anyone that does?

[jmak]

The school my kids go to has multiple feeds - the main school feeds are open, but several departments have their own, such as PE, where they like to give match reports with photos. If you request access to follow those, the department has someone to vet the requests AFAIK by checking your details against the contact details held for you and that your child is involved in the activity. I suspect this is a significant overhead - last time I applied was on a Sunday afternoon and the teacher responded within an hour. I hope the teacher chose to do that and it wasn't an expectation...

[foofighterjim]

@jmak I take it at some point you have provided the school with your Twitter handle for them to validate your request?

[CAM]

OK, you are doing "How to Screw Up Corporate Twitter 101" so pay attention to the following:

 

1) Limit the logins. Giving it to all staff gives maximum risk and zero accountability. Someone can post "Vote Trump! #MAGA" or "I love Hitler" and you won't know who it is whilst dumping a huge storm of unpleasant hate stuff in your timeline. By restricting the logins, you are restricting the list of potential culprits for screw-ups who are briefed as to what you can and cannot say. Which brings us to...

 

2) Everything posted on your timeline is what the school says, not the person posting it. "But it's my opinion" doesn't matter, people's workplaces are already held to account for what they post on their own timelines, now imagine something controversial being posted with your school name and logo next to it. Yeah, not good.

 

3) The password must also be changed regularly and heavily restricted to those who need to know. What's that, a kid got the teacher's phone or left logged in on their desktop? Commence Rick and Morty memes spamming parents, public and stakeholders. Someone not kept it secure and it's been leaked? Now you are peddling Twitter Followers, porn and viagra. Maybe even Anonymous masks leering out from your timeline with the words "LOL HACKED!"

 

4) Know what you want to say. Initially you will just use it to distribute website news and closures. Then branch out to answering queries directly. Remember E-Safety and use a third-party client that logs all message sent if possible for accountability. Eventually you might get someone canny at social media cracking jokes and driving traffic to the timeline (and subsequently school) but be careful, it is very VERY easy to offend on Twitter. Something as simple as a wrong gender pronoun or badly timed joke about a recent tragedy can cause you untold amounts of trouble.

 

5) Anyone can contact you and anyone can read what you post. Don't even bother locking the account, people will leak it so others can see it. Blocking can be circumvented by simply logging out. It is better to regulate your conduct on Twitter on a corporate account rather than trying to hide things. If you feel it should be hidden, you probably shouldn't be doing it on Twitter. On that note, content you are sent or appearing from those you follow may not be safe for work (even if the account you are following is seemingly benign). Be mindful of that before browsing the school Twitter on the IWB to get offensive photos and artwork appearing in front of a classroom.

 

On this note, follower favourites now appear in timelines. So if you follow the students and one of them faves something adult or otherwise offensive, it can end up in your timeline as "Student X liked this" or even one of their parents...or teachers...governors....

 

There is a reason that social media presence is a multi-million pound business and key to many business processes and marketing campaigns. It can have a huge positive impact if you know the pitfalls and have a properly trained person or team managing the feed. It would be especially useful for answering public questions before, during and after school open days (scatter some QR codes for your Twitter timeline around brochures, displays, etc). But if you throw it at staff with no clear idea what they or you are doing, then you are running headlong into disaster.

[AJWhite1970]

Over 50 school twitter feeds here, all used heavily either centrally or departmental. The HM often walks round school tweeting fun things from his phone and the PE department are brilliant at covering all sports live. Many of the departments have 100's of followers.

 

Rules of twitter for us?

1) Central email account for all updates for all accounts so I have one place to check for rogue activity

2) Never uniquely identify a student by name, so John from Y8 is OK, JOhn Smith from 8T isn't

3) No photos with anyone with their top off (sounds odd but the 1st Rugby team fell foul of that one a while back oh and we are a boys school)

4) Replies are turned off

[jmak]

@jmak I take it at some point you have provided the school with your Twitter handle for them to validate your request?

Yes. Twitter handle, Instagram and Facebook alongside email, mobile number and child's name and form. It seems to work, but strikes me as a lot of overhead for someone.

[pooley]

That's brave!

 

They are all professionals and are treated as so, some use it more than others and all contribute. Otherwise you wouldn't get a broad view of the entire school/classes?

[foofighterjim]

@CAM - Thanks for this, I may send the majority of this to the others that were at the meeting.

 

@AJWhite1970 - All those accounts having the same contact email address doesn't cause any problems? I take it they sign in with the handle rather then the email address?!

 

@jmak - This is what I fear for locking it down, it wouldn't be my burden but I wouldn't wish it on anyone unless it was their full time job.

[TomHD]

When you say restricted do you mean that you're the only people who know the credentials to actually login to Twitter?

Yeah only those people I listed have the login credentials

[TomHD]

They are all professionals and are treated as so, some use it more than others and all contribute. Otherwise you wouldn't get a broad view of the entire school/classes?

We did discuss allowing universal access but worried about the potential for rogue activities on such a public site. We still capture a very broad view of the school's achievements using the limited access approach we take.

[AJWhite1970]

@AJWhite1970 - All those accounts having the same contact email address doesn't cause any problems? I take it they sign in with the handle rather then the email address?!

 

Correct. I have one account [email protected] which then has a smtp alias for each twitter account in the school. Teachers login using the handle not the email address. Works really well

[MatthewL]

Although not in education but in public sector I run our account, will explain how we work ours, except we are a group with no funds and our time given so you get an idea.

 

Ideally would use something like Hootsuite to manage logins and trace things but we don't have cash and only 2 of us have the login, me and one other.

 

We only follow other other teams/groups within the organisation, some other key organisations and some key staff who have corporate accounts as such. Don't follow any members back. Anyone can follow us but if any suspicious accounts follow us we block them plus one or two other trouble makers. Have created a number of private lists so follow other staff that tweet but don't have corporate accounts or high enough status.

 

I try to limit the likes but the other user is a key one for this, no harm and no policy set other than common sense. Will retweet key orginisation when key messages come out, we tweet about our group activities (all are of age so no issues) but try to keep them brief and protect any members. Use Tweetdeck for the odd scheduled tweet when I know I want to put something out but only me that uses that.

 

Have created a brief description as a bit of a disclaimer for us and a few generic display images and away we go, changed the colour.

 

I did prefer it just been me but then things got missed so I let someone else who is sensible do the live tweets when I'm not around.

[mavhc]

So I have had a meeting with the Head and a few other key stakeholders this morning and they feel that as a school we are missing a bit of a trick by not having a proper presence on Twitter (or any social medium for that matter). The main objective is to establish better, more frequent dialogue with parents. Being particularly anti-social I have never used Twitter, Facebook, Instagram et al, so I really could do with some advice. Nothing is set in stone but there are a few stumbling blocks that I came up with but don't really know enough about the inner workings of Twitter.

 

One of the things that was mentioned was locking the profile down to just invited people so we could post material that may come under DPA / GDPR (thinking student images with names rather than home addresses etc.). However, my mind immediately turned to how do we know these accounts belong to who they claim to be, this could be resolved by a mass push on the collection of parental Twitter handles but this will take a lot of admin to get right. Do others lock the account down or do you simply not Tweet specifics or student images?

 

Then there was the matter of workload, we would be looking at several people with access to the same account. Are there any potential pitfalls of several people potentially being logged in and Tweeting at the same time on the same account (other than accountability of the posts)?

 

Ultimately I guess I'm asking has your school ever had a Twitter account, is it still widely used, what does your school Tweet about, to whom and how frequently?

 

As always, any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Firstly consider what you can do with your own website to achieve all those things, you're paying for it, might as well use your own platform, which you can fully control.

 

onesignal for notifications, allow comments, have multiple tags/categories so people can pick what they're interested in.

 

Secondly ask what kinds of dialogue you want, what's the aim of the whole exercise? To tell parents stuff? To promote the school to potential new pupils? To learn about problems people have and fix them? Who will be answering questions, which questions will you ignore, are you answering publicly or via DM? What's your policy for blocking people? What will you do if some botnet starts replying to every tweet calling you hitler?

[foofighterjim]

Firstly consider what you can do with your own website to achieve all those things, you're paying for it, might as well use your own platform, which you can fully control.

 

onesignal for notifications, allow comments, have multiple tags/categories so people can pick what they're interested in.

 

Secondly ask what kinds of dialogue you want, what's the aim of the whole exercise? To tell parents stuff? To promote the school to potential new pupils? To learn about problems people have and fix them? Who will be answering questions, which questions will you ignore, are you answering publicly or via DM? What's your policy for blocking people? What will you do if some botnet starts replying to every tweet calling you hitler?

 

They are seeing Twitter as a vehicle to drive more traffic to our website. Things like X, Y or Z was going on in school today. Read more about it here:

 

The ultimate aim is to generate awareness amongst the parents of the large array of things going on in the school. Teenagers aren't necessarily the best conveyors of information and we very much live in a world where people expect the news to come to them, rather than the other way around. I don't think we would want to be dealing with questions via Social Media, that would be like opening Pandora's Box. In my mind communication would be one way only, (still lacking in fundamental knowledge) is this possible on Twitter? I presume this would remove the risk of your final point.

[mavhc]

If you don't want DMs just don't follow anyone.

 

But use onesignal on your own website to allow people to subscribe to notifications for updates to the site. Solves all the problems, I assume anyone who's following a school twitter account would have visited the school website at least once.

[PotNoodleTech]

Good thread - we're just starting to use twitter here, created a main school account which will be used for news and useful info regarding the school and it's partners. That account is controlled by Net Man and will be delegated to one or two others. No general staff access as I deem that too risky. One little mistake on someone else's part could create a whole world of pain for the main school account.

 

I've created a collection in our tweetdeck called "website news" and embedded this as the news section on our website. This collection will only contain items we designate as newsworthy (it's good so that we can like and retweet whatever we want on the twitter account but only items in this collection will be shown on the website). That's working really well.

 

Creating accounts for staff/departments who have requested it. Going to continue to build up it's use over the rest of this term.

 

Have decided to try not to identify pupils on anything we post. I know that almost every other school in the world does identify both name or age or both alongside photos. I find it strange, worrying and ironic that thousands of schools breech data protection laws on a daily basis and nothing comes of it. So far we've been doing "year 10 pupils doing blah blah" (which gets me twitching) or just "pupils doing blah blah" which is fine.

[foofighterjim]

Going back to a point I raised earlier that got lost in everything else.

 

How do you all go about getting pictures of activities efficiently Tweeted? At the moment we would have to take them on the school camera, copy onto the network, then Tweet from the computer. I fear that this would be far too long winded for anyone to bother with long term. There was a mention of using personal phones with the Twitter account to achieve this, something which I immediately objected to for obvious reasons. It did get me thinking though, do others have a shared mobile device with Twitter on it to achieve this?

[pooley]

We have given staff devices to do this, cheap android tablets. (even though every member of staff has a school issued ipad)

[gpjt]

Our school has twitter and has done for a number of years which is crucial to communicating with the parents.

Staff have access to the twitter account and tweet when and however much they want to. We have so many positive comments/mentions about how good it is that parents get to see what their child is doing at school.

 

Trust the staff they are professionals at the end of the day! Yes they could put something out there controversial or detrimental to your school, but can they not do that in other ways that are far more out of your control?

 

Embrace it! It's where the parents and kids are!

 

We have main account over 1500 followers and link it to our Facebook page so that the tweets form the content on the FB page.

All staff have access to Twitter upon request and logged.

Twitter/FB monitored by myself.

E Safety policy indicating what staff are allowed to do/not do, the usual no full names with pics etc and now no pics of individual students.

Social media accounts all signed up using an admin email account, should anyone try and change the password etc then we always have access.