School Facebook Page

[philjones2000]

Hi All

 

We are looking to put our school on facebook- to promote the school, PTA meeting dates etc.

 

Does anyone have any experience of this sort of thing? Pitfalls to watch for?

 

Thanks

 

Phil

[featured_spectre]

children coming on and spamming the hell out of it!

[glennda]

children coming on and spamming the hell out of it!

 

 

Yeah apart from that - enless you make the wall read only or something. But you could be opening yourselves up to all sorts.

 

But I have seen quite a few schools using twitter as it is easily embedded into websites etc.

 

T

[TronXP]

Facebook can be set up so people can't post on the wall and it can be brilliant for communication to students and parents. Lots and lots of Students and parents use facebook, take advantage and use it as one of the communication tools in your armoury after all it doesn't cost anything!

[Little-Miss]

we've set our school one up, has no wall or anything. Was recommended to the head to apparently stop students creating their own page for their own use so i did as i was told.

[kevbaz]

We use both Facebook and twitter, but luckily its all handled by one of our sponsors

[mjs_mjs]

you'll have to lock the fb page down allot and fiddle with security settings - one of our local PTA's asked our LA for advice and they said don't use facebook at all - but they went against that advice and are using it well. (it came up at an NCPTA event)

[jcollings]

Yep - we use it here. The students on our marketing committee set it up for us (with some ideas about what we want it to do). It's locked down pretty tightly so it's pretty much one way communication. We also use Twitter which is connect to our facebook page now as well.

[elsiegee40]

No specific issues with it, other than

1. Make sure the content is not stuff that the under 13s will want access to... you're not in the business of attracting them onto to facebook against their T&Cs

2. If you have got material on there that under 13s will want access to, put it somewhere else as well... such as the school website

3. Pictures involving pupils shouldn't go on facebook without parental permission and should only involve the over 13s. Never tag them and don't allow them to be tagged.

 

Best advice is to use facebook as A means of contacting the parents, not THE means of contacting the parents. Make sure everything that goes on facebook can be accessed in another way, remembering that Safeguarding the children and protecting their identities is a very high priority.

[HTCIT]

WOW - It's good to see Schools using Facebook to communicate with Parents. I thought this would be a no go area. I may have a word with the head.

[elsiegee40]

We use twitter and it's very popular at times of snow closure. It's a public feed, so people don't have to subscribe to look at it. It's just used for announcements.

 

We don't, yet, use facebook. The original decision was made because it was felt to be unsuitable when the school was a primary school. However, we are in the process of establishing a 'Former Pupils association' (private school) and the facebook page will probably appear as part of that. It is not our intention to use it for announcements.

 

HTICT, as you're in Snodland, your school should consider using the KMFM Kent School Closures service as part of its announcement system.

[Sylv3r]

We have facebook and we have found a succefful tool for communication with all stake holders. We have nearly 2,000 members on our page.

 

I put a document together as to the pro's and con's - I'll try and dig it out.

[Sylv3r]

I dropped in a lot of buzz words - just to make it sound good and give us a counter argument if we have parents / staff against it.

 

---------

As a school we can’t hide from the fact that sites such as FaceBook are available to our students on the internet, if used responsibly these are fantastic tools to use to assist with communication channels and further increasing the public image of the school nationally and worldwide. Allowing us to link to content hosted on our school site bringing more visitors on a daily basis to view the content we wish to share. We currently get a lot of hits to our school website via Facebook of new and repeat visitors.

 

Students will use sites such as FaceBook whether as a school we choose to promote it or not, if we are shown to utilise sites such as FaceBook I believe it will show to our students that it is not just a toy or gimmick and that professionally this has its benefits. This also reminds students that these pages are public and include people who may not necessarily be in their friendship network, encouraging them to look at issues around permissions and sharing personal information.

 

Students will not read the schools newsletter or actively search the schools website for information, but they will generally use FaceBook several times per week if not daily and the schools information will be served to them via their FaceBook home page.

 

Providing an official St. Bede’s School page allows us to post and moderate the messages we want to give via St. Bede’s School. There is an unofficial St. Bede’s page that has been setup by a former student that we are unable to remove that may contain material that we do wish to be associated with ourselves. Advertising the official page on our website allows us to distance ourselves from the above mentioned site.

 

At the moment we are one of a few schools who utilise the tools such as FaceBook or Twitter, but I see it being a growing trend that more schools will follow suit especially further into the 21st Century.

 

Fantastic form of communication with:

 

Present Students

Former Students

Parents

Outside World

[HTCIT]

That would be great if you could. :-)

[philjones2000]

Fab suggestions as always edu-geekers, I'm setting up a working party with an assistant head and we'll go from there. Thanks

[alan-d]

we've set our school one up, has no wall or anything. Was recommended to the head to apparently stop students creating their own page for their own use so i did as i was told.

 

FB is blocked by BGFL here, do you have an unfiltered connection you use within school?

[GREED]

In interesting topic that plenty have talked about or implemented, and something I am working on with the training company I currently work with for advertising to young (16-19) learners.