photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pvantees/

There are three parts to my project and the first part (the teacher piece) is well under way. I have an upcoming all-faculty meeting where I will be working with our tech team to help all faculty create Twitter accounts. I know it seems a bit ambitious to tackle this with the whole faculty but I do feel strongly that this is the first step in getting people on board with social media. I can talk and demo the use of Twitter but until people actually get an account and start to use it things will tend to stay stagnant for them.

As a school we have made a serious social media push this year. Thanks to @katharinemudra, our new Director of Communications, the school now has a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Katherine and I are both new to our positions this year and are excited to see where these new social media accounts will take us. But that push has mostly an outward-facing promotional goal. Teachers using social media to improve their practice is an entirely different thing!

What advice do you have for this upcoming meeting? Is it insane to think I could get 100 faculty on Twitter in 40 minutes? I have already had 20-30 minutes in a previous all-staff meeting where I talked about the purpose of Twitter and best practices. This was more of a foundational session. I talked about how teachers should represent themselves online. What not to post, etc. We have, since then, given specific instructions to teachers via email about what they are able to post in terms of students images. So the foundation is laid in terms of “the rules” of Twitter use.

What has been the biggest “hook” for you in terms of getting teachers connected with Twitter or other social media? What advice do you have for our upcoming “all staff on Twitter in 40 minutes” session? Hit the comments below and give me (and others who may try the same thing) some help 🙂