Social Media Strategy


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A Social Media Strategy for Educators

As I write this, my school's Twitter account has reached 4000 updates! That's roughly 800 tweets a year, 80 tweets a month, or 4 tweets every school day!

Twitter has played a significant part of my professional life over the last 5 years. After spending several years teaching about Purpose and Audience in language class, I'd like to share my reflections on how I use Twitter (and social media more broadly) both for myself professionally and on behalf of my school. I'm particularly interested in developing community capacity in the educator community through sharing my school social media strategy. Hopefully people in other schools (whether teacher representatives or administrators) can reflect on what I've done and develop both their own thinking on these 21st century tools and their own approach to its use. I also know that putting this all in writing will help me to continue to refine my own practice.


"What if every teacher tweeted one thing a day that they did in their classroom to a school hashtag, and they took five minutes out of their day to read each other’s tweets?  What impact would that have on learning and school culture?" George Couros http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/5093


I'd like to extend this to "what if every school in a district looked at each others tweets?" Wouldn't that have an amplifying effect on successful innovations and teaching and learning ideas within a district? What if we encouraged our students to participate in this observation? Could students begin to share their voice and choice, after seeing something they like in another school/class and advocate to see that in their OWN class or school? For this reason I have made a point of following other schools in the TDSB. With staff turnover being fairly low, schools can go for years with little to no substantial change or even contact with other schools.

Through Twitter, schools are no longer lonely "we don't know a different way" silos or defensive "this is the way we've always done it" fortresses, but can become nerve endings within a larger decentralized interconnected nervous system.


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