Using a twitter account for school
I have set up a twitter account for school: @BudeSchool. I used it infrequently to post info about school events but never really used it effectively. Also, followers were few and far between. However, twitters popularity has increased massively with our students and also the parents. (Twitter is now the second most popular form of communication with radio 1). So I have now revisited our account. Still need to get the pupils and parents to follow us, but it is slowly increasing.
This time I decided to use the functionality of socialoomph (used to be tweetlater). I have now set up the whole school calendar to auto tweet, and the account also auto follows and sends a “thank you for following” DM.
One caveat, if students follow you, then you see their tweets. This has caused me a few issues.
1. Do I really want to see their thoughts about their lessons?
2. Do I need to see their creative use of language?
3. Do I need to know what they are doing?
I am also going to show the Head how to use it so that he can have the opportunity to update. The next question is, who else needs to have access?
I have used Twitter as a specific communication device on a school trip ,and it had a massive and popular impact with the parents. To my mind, keeping communicating is essential for parents to feel ‘in the loop’. This is a great idea – keep it up!
I’m going to try and get our marketing director to update the Twitter account @stbenedicts. He regularly updates the school website with news and could tweet the link each time.
Twitter is blocked in Aberdeenshire. I use Tweetree.com to access and read but cannot get full functionality. At the moment I use my @familysimpson account to post CPD ideas and links and updates on my games based learning projects. I agree that I wouldn’t necessarily want to read what my pupils are doing outside of school. Pupils also would not have separate twitter accounts for home and school and I expect teaching staff would be of the same opinion! Food for thought…