5 Keys to Effective Social Media Strategy for Schools and School Districts

Should schools and school districts have a "social media strategy" like business and industry? In the corporate world, social media has moved from being a novelty to a deliberate strategy to engage the public. It seems like schools and school districts mostly do social media as an add on, where someone in the central office "just happens" to post announcements to Facebook or Twitter. But if schools were going to be more deliberate about their social media strategy, what would they do? According to Brad Friedman, in a recent post called "5 Must-Haves for Social Media Management," companies are "bringing in whole teams of specialists to craft effective social media strategies and manage their multiplying numbers of social media accounts." In education, with our austere budgets, hiring a whole team of specialists to craft a social media strategy won't happen any time soon. In fact, though some social media experts might argue otherwise, I am not entirely sure schools and school districts need the heavy-duty social media strategy that companies need, at least not yet. But we can learn a great deal from those experts and apply it to our situation as non-profit educational establishments.

When it comes to social media strategy, I think we really have to begin with the question of "What can social media do for us?" And we should also ask the question, "Is it the most effective way to accomplish what we are trying to accomplish?" If it is being used as a simple communication tool, is that the best way to communicate our message? One of the main characteristics of social media is that it is a "multi-way" connection medium. Users can engage to multi-way communication with constituents. School administrators are often unskilled in this kind of engagement, and very often either uncomfortable or even unwilling to engage in a multi-way conversation that social media offers. There's a "desire for control" of the conversation or its outcomes which is an anathema to social media thinking altogether.

Taking Friedman's ideas regarding 5 keys for social media management and applying them to schools requires adjusting them a bit, and transforming them so that they fit the needs of a school or district. If school districts are going to engage in social media in the manner in which it is designed, which means engaging in its use as a multi-way medium, then here's 5 keys to effectively managing a school or district's social media strategy.

1. Have deliberate plan on when and how your school or district will use social media. In his post, Friedman talks about the need for businesses to maximize scheduling of their messages through social media. The time of day and day of the week a social media message is sent does matter. When it is received by constituents will determine the message's effectiveness. This is true in business, and I suspect it is true with schools and districts too. My own experience has taught me that a message posted on our school Facebook page tends to get more "likes" and comments if I post early in the mornings, before 6:30 AM than in the middle of the day. Also, a message posted over the weekend is likely to get the same level of attention as early mornings. Why is that? I suspect many of our students and their parents, look over their Facebook timeline first thing in the mornings to see what they received over night, and on the weekends they simply have more time to follow their messages. I have no studies to prove such, but it does make sense. A school or district would do well to plan when is the most effective times to get the word out through social media. They also would do well to think about how they will deliver that message. Will it be through Facebook, Twitter. Google +? In addition, schools and school districts need to plan to use social media tools like Facebook, not just as a digital intercom on which to make announcements, but also as a way to engage constituents in a multi-way conversation.

2. Know your constituents and know the kinds of content they want and need. There are the obvious kinds of content for social media: announcements, photos, etc. But if a school or district tunes in and listens to its constituents, they will get an accurate idea regarding what kind of content they want and expect. School districts should use social media to also engage constituents in conversations about how they are doing. Why not post proposed schedule changes on Facebook and allow students and parents comment on them? More importantly, respond to their comments to show you as a school or district are listening. Listening in social media is as important as posting.

3. Use the tools at hand to monitor the social media and web stream to listen to what constituents and others are saying about your school or district. Tools like Ice Rocket and Addictomatic are two free web tools school leaders can use to see what others are saying about their organizations. Google Alerts is another. Using social media and other tools to listen to the conversation about your school or district is important in the 21st century, and to make an effective social media strategy.

4. Collaborate with other school and district leaders and develop a genuine social media strategy and plan for your organization. It is great to hear that school leaders are now wading into social media use with their Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts, but perhaps it's time to get serious about using the medium. Maybe it is time to earnestly develop a social media plan and actually consider social media campaigns to promote what the school or district is doing. Making the most of social media means perhaps using it the way businesses are: they are using it to promote their brand. It's time for schools to do the same.

5. Monitor the effectiveness of your school or district's social media strategy by tracking and analyzing statistics regarding its use. Using tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and web site view data should not be just done by businesses. As schools wade further into social media use, and also spend more resources on social media strategy, monitoring the effectiveness of that use is important. If your school or district spends hours setting up and maintaining a web site, and no one is visiting that site, that is hardly effective use of resources. School leaders must begin to use the tools available to track and analyze the effectiveness of their social media use.

As our schools move deeper into the 21st century, school leaders must rethink social media's place in the school or district. Many still see it as a fad or a nusiance, and fight to keep it out, as if that were possible. Perhaps it is time for schools and districts to begin thinking in terms of having an effective social media strategy instead.

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Community Service Graduation Requirement: Making 21st Century Global Citizens

In order encourage civic engagement and to foster the idea that giving back to the community in which we live is a virtue, our school adopted a community service requirement for graduation early in its founding. At our high school, students are required to earn 150 hours of community service before they graduate. In order to make sure students earn those hours, we have implemented a rather simple system that ensures our students meet these requirements.

Here’s 4 considerations for those who wish to implement a community service graduation requirement.

• Maintain community service folders for each student. These folders need to be reviewed periodically by administration or a guidance counselor, and students and their parents need to be informed regularly about their status toward earning their community service credit for graduation. Communication and reminders to students to get their community service hours in is a must.
• Allow students to count a variety of civic activities toward their community service hours. For example, our students often engage in mission trips or work as interns during the summer months. We allow students to count those hours toward their community service credit. They only need provide a letter of documentation from someone responsible for the activity.
• Contact community and civic organizations and let them know about your community service requirements and that your students are available. For example, our county library and community theater uses our students often as volunteers, and these organizations contact us when they have possible community service opportunities. Making sure the community knows about the requirement means they will often reach out to the school when they need volunteers.
• Make it the student’s responsibility to make sure their hours are properly documented. We do not use a community service coordinator or other person to maintain this program. Students know that it is their responsibility to provide us with proper documentation. This makes implementing a community service requirement relatively inexpensive.

Adding a community service credit to graduation requirements can be done without major expenses and without overburdening an already busy staff. In our 21st century global society, it is vital our students engage in the greater community as volunteers to be proper global citizens. Implementing a community service graduation requirement will give students the opportunity to act as involved citizens.

21st Century School Leaders Must Search for New Ways of Doing School

"Our Education System Isn't Broken, It's Designed to Create Winners and Losers" according to Camika Royal in a post by that title on Good. That argument is made by others as well. Our education system with its grade levels, standardized testing, and accountability measures is all about labeling both kids and educators as either "winners" or "losers."

As Royal indicates, our education system has its problems in the areas of equity and fairness, but it does exactly what it was designed to do: "It sorts and sifts." It chooses some students over others when it dispenses opportunities. It decides who gets to move into management and who will be relegated to unskilled labor. The only problem is, those unskilled labor jobs have all but disappeared, so those being sorted and sifted to that future actually have no place to go and no future. Instead of looking for new ways of schooling, we cling to the old, and continue tweaking the edges.

I have to agree with Royal when she points out our American education system actually does "permit and demand differences in access to opportunities---it compels inequity." Our education system was actually built to perpetuate the educational and economic situation for which we now face. It wants to dispense opportunity according to 19th and 20th century rules, but those rules are not adequate in a global economic and political environment. Where is the answer?

Some of the things Royal suggests include:

• Shift our blame and focus off students and put it on educational, socioeconomic, and political systems that are allowing this inequity to continue.
• Focus on educational excellence, opportunity and access, equitable funding, equitable distribution of resources, and search for new ways of "doing school."

For 21st century school leaders, it is time to begin in earnest to question and examine many of these core values, beliefs, and doctrines,  that still drive our modern educational systems as well as our economic and political systems, if we want to survive both economically and politically in a highly competitive global environment. I hesitate to say this because it might be misconstrued by those still caught in nostalgic views of past educational, economic, and political glories, but perhaps we need to hold nothing sacred so that we can critically examine everything about our educational, political and social systems.

Take the accountability and testing movement as an example. In some ways accountability systems are blame deflectors. By default, they look for ways to deflect the blame for inequity of access and opportunity to students (and now teachers), instead of closely examining how our economic, political, and educational system is really the issue. As we tenaciously hold on to those systems and beliefs, naturally our education systems aren't living up to 21st century expectations and standards.

We need to stop clinging to a nostalgic past, and honestly look for "new ways of doing school" as Royal suggests. Instead, though, we continue our tinkering around the edges of education with accountability systems and new standards, and "reform flavors of the month." In the end, none of these things will bring lasting, effective change to 21st century education in America.

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Penultimate: Handwritten Notes App for iPad That Syncs with Evernote

Earlier this week, I mentioned Notability as an app of choice to take handwritten notes on the iPad. It is an excellent choice for those looking for an inexpensive option for notetaking and an app with a number of features.

Another app for the iPad that offers users an excellent experience in taking handwritten notes is the iPad app, Penultimate. Now that Evernote has assumed control of this app, it's ability to sync with that application offers users an interesting feature not found in Notability.

Penultimate is an excellent choice for a note taking app for a number of reasons.

Penultimate's Notebook Interface

• Currenty Penultimate is a free app.
• It has a simple user interface.
• Users can create multiple custom notebooks for their notes.
• Insert existing photos or take new ones and insert those within your handwritten notes.
• Penultimate fully syncs with your Evernote account, which means you ultimately have access to your handwritten notes within your Evernote account.
• Choose your pen color or size.
• Choose the paper format for your notes.

Note Taking Page in Penultimate

But unlike Notability, Penultimate only allows you to take handwritten notes. There is no feature that allows you type text notes. Still, for those looking for an excellent app for taking handwritten notes that syncs with your Evernote account, Penultimate is a great choice. For more information about Penultimate, check out Evernote's web site. http://evernote.com/penultimate/

 

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3 Steps to Managing Your School or District's Online Reputation

In their book, Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online, authors Andy Beal and Judy Strauss entitle one chapter "You Don't Own Your Company's Reputation."

That idea is equally true for schools and districts and should remind twenty-first century school leaders that they "don't own their school or school district's reputation either." It is so easy for administrators to still engage in trying to protect the reputation of their schools, because that is the conventional thinking. But with the advent of social media and self-publishing ability of the web in general, protecting your school or district's reputation becomes an exercise in futility. Instead, 21st century school leaders must shift their thinking from protecting their school or district's reputation to managing that reputation. Trying to control the conversation about your organization is impossible in the digital age.

What are some beginning steps toward "managing a school or district's online reputation?" Taking the advice of Beal and Strauss, here are some starting points to consider.

1. Begin with internal stakeholders. Since you can't really control what people say about you in social media and online anymore, you start your reputation management with those who really know you: your students, teachers, parents, and other employees. Enlist them as advocates. Get them to help you get the word out. They can also alert you to negative talk on social media, so that you can work to get the information out there that tells your side of things.

2. Monitor the web to see what people are saying about your school or district. Set up Google Alerts to catch when someone publishes something about your school. This simple tool will immediately alert you by email when someone posts something about your school on a blog, website or news article.

3. Be transparent: be honest. Managing your online reputation isn't about posting a false information to cover up the negatives about your school or district. It is about making sure what is being said is accurate, and that your side of the story is being told. It is also about proactively listening to what people's beef is about your school, and honestly responding to them. Finally, it's about just being honest and not hiding things.

These three starting points are a good place to start for school leaders who want to begin managing their school or district's reputation rather than trying to protect it. As Beal and Strauss indicate regarding companies, 21st century school leaders must realize they no longer own our school's reputation either, and must move their thinking to managing that reputation rather than protecting or controlling it.

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North Carolina Governor Pat McCroy's Narrow View of Purpose of Education

New North Carolina governor, Pat McCroy, recently made clear his stance and philosophy regarding education. He simply sees little value in a liberal arts education. Economic interests are central to his views on education, at the exclusion of all else.

"If you want to take gender studies that's fine, go to a private school and take it. But I don't want to subsidize that if that's not going to get someone a job," stated Governor McCroy when speaking about his desire to transform higher education in this state. (Here's the Charlotte Observer article)

This statement by McCroy betrays his beliefs about the fundamental purposes of education. One can't but help wonder whether he sees education as only a means to economic interest. Of course, there is some merit in the idea of college leading to a higher paying job. After all, who does not want to a good job after spending four years time and hard-won money obtaining a college degree? But, and this is important, let's not dangerously venture too far in that direction either. The true danger in McCroy's views on education is taking a too narrow view of education's purpose, a view that lacks a vision and eye to the future.

Education's goals should include economic interests, but it should also include wider interests as well. Things like furthering human potential, bettering oneself, and expanding our horizons should equally be important. Perhaps education's goal should be simply to better ourselves as human beings, and that is not measured solely by our economic contributions. Those are measured by our greater contributions to the world around us. Seeing education as more than a pathway to a job as these goals do, means seeing all of education's potential.

Governor McCroy specifically knocks the gender studies progam at UNC in his statement, which he clearly sees as a waste of taxpayer money. But I think his statement and views are quite dangerous. We don't have to agree with all that is taught in universities and colleges, but who is omniscient enough to start making the decisions on what degree programs should be cut and what should be kept? Traveling down that road is quite slippery and could lead us to a university system that is quite capable of feeding the economic interests, but is incapable of producing people who can see beyond their own selfish economic interests.

In the end, I can only hope that many, many college graduates let Governor McCroy know that we do not want he suggests, which is to turn our university system into just a servant to economic interests alone. Higher education should not be turned into a factory that churns out workers for business and industry. It should also provide graduates who have a much larger vision for themselves and the world. 

Notability: Simple and Easy Way to Take Handwritten Notes on the iPad

Notability is an iPad app for taking typewritten and handwritten notes. It has a simple interface, with only the minimal features that support these tasks. Here are some of its most prominent features.

• Take or write handwritten notes. You can use multiple colors, and even move your handwritten notes about the page.
• Record and attach audio notes to your documents.
• Send and store your notes in the cloud. You can send them to applications like Dropbox, Google Drive, or even iTunes.
• Simple and easy use.
• Highlight notes in your document.
• Create and organize your notes by categorizing them.

Notability App Interface

Overall, Notability is an excellent app for its current price of $1.99. For those who rely on being able to take handwritten notes on their iPad, Notability is a solid, economical choice.

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