Rachel (@rachelboyd) is the DP and elearning leader at Waiuku Primary School. In this talk Rachel shares how she has used Facebook and Twitter to engage with her school community.
All schools crave a higher level of connection with our communities, our parents, caregivers, those who are the first teachers of our children. And we certainly know that technology make that home school partnership a lot easier.
We all know there’s stacks of evidence that shows that a positive home and school environment actually really can impact on student learning. And our school has all the usual ways of encouraging that home school partnership. So we have the school newsletter that goes home once a week, the school website, we have our email addresses available to our parents and our staff also email parents home quite a bit. Of course we have our class blogs, which are essentially the heart of the learning and not only can share learning with parents but also on a wide global stage as well. And of course, we all know that class blogs open up learning 24 hours a day to our community.
In 2010 we started experimenting. I was inspired by the work of Jane Danielson at Willowbank School where she had started a really successful school Facebook page. So with a group of parent guinea pigs, as I like to call them, we started a trial mid 2010 and worked on ways we could use that school Facebook page in the official sense to inform our community, to really keep them up to date with events that were happening and to make sure that we were having another form of engagement with them that was open, both within school hours as well as being outside of school hours.
The Facebook page was really successful, http://facebook.com/waiukuprimaryschool and at 2011 at the start of the year we launched it kind of officially and it has been growing really steadily. And a great place where parents can feel that they can ‘like’ our school and really be involved. We have lots of parents who now ask questions online, for example the other day “Can you tell me about the stationery list for 2012”. A really great place for us to keep that connection alive, even when it is the school holidays as well.
So with the Facebook page we encourage that it is for parents and caregivers only really. We have had a few students join and we have just had to have some conversations with them over appropriate use and age restrictions for Facebook. But mainly another really interesting aspect that we are exploring is automatically publishing the feeds to our class blogs onto the Facebook page. Which has been really great just to get that extra bit of readership for our class blogs and our students who are sharing wonderful learning.
On the other side of the Facebook page I also experimented a little bit with using Twitter with our school community. This was quite a foreign concept to most and even a few of the parents that I had in my class of students I taught and we had a couple of afternoon sessions, it never really seemed to grab parents. I put the notices in the school newsletter publishing it and promoting it and I think that Twitter was just a little bit out of the reach of many of our school community. But the best thing that happened after that I found a way where you could actually get the Twitter feed sent to a mobile phone. Fantastic because about 95% or perhaps even more of our school community has got a phone. So when parents text follow Waiuku primary to 8987 they can get all of our Twitter feeds directly sent to their phone. It has been a trial for the second half of 2011 and it has been so successful we are rolling it out school-wide at the start of 2012. Each day in the morning we post a school based events kind of round up, of course all comprehensively in 140 characters. Usually reminding parents of events that are happening or promoting something that is going on in the school. And I have heard really rave review comments, for example, a PTA meeting I walked past and a parent said, “Thank you so much for sending that text, I would have forgotten”. The feedback from parents has been that it has been so much appreciated because sometimes drawing that information out of students is not that easy.
So really, really important to us at our school to enhance that home school partnership. We have really found that not only the class blogs, but the Facebook phone and the Twitter feed going to the mobile phones as well has been really successful. Hopefully a lot of our community will be continuing to engage with us and we are really looking forward to a really strong home school partnership in 2012 that really will impact and benefit our children’s learning as well.
Rachel (@rachelboyd) is the DP and elearning leader at Waiuku Primary School. In this talk Rachel shares how she has used Facebook and Twitter to engage with her school community.
All schools crave a higher level of connection with our communities, our parents, caregivers, those who are the first teachers of our children. And we certainly know that technology make that home school partnership a lot easier.
We all know there’s stacks of evidence that shows that a positive home and school environment actually really can impact on student learning. And our school has all the usual ways of encouraging that home school partnership. So we have the school newsletter that goes home once a week, the school website, we have our email addresses available to our parents and our staff also email parents home quite a bit. Of course we have our class blogs, which are essentially the heart of the learning and not only can share learning with parents but also on a wide global stage as well. And of course, we all know that class blogs open up learning 24 hours a day to our community.
In 2010 we started experimenting. I was inspired by the work of Jane Danielson at Willowbank School where she had started a really successful school Facebook page. So with a group of parent guinea pigs, as I like to call them, we started a trial mid 2010 and worked on ways we could use that school Facebook page in the official sense to inform our community, to really keep them up to date with events that were happening and to make sure that we were having another form of engagement with them that was open, both within school hours as well as being outside of school hours.
The Facebook page was really successful, http://facebook.com/waiukuprimaryschool and at 2011 at the start of the year we launched it kind of officially and it has been growing really steadily. And a great place where parents can feel that they can ‘like’ our school and really be involved. We have lots of parents who now ask questions online, for example the other day “Can you tell me about the stationery list for 2012”. A really great place for us to keep that connection alive, even when it is the school holidays as well.
So with the Facebook page we encourage that it is for parents and caregivers only really. We have had a few students join and we have just had to have some conversations with them over appropriate use and age restrictions for Facebook. But mainly another really interesting aspect that we are exploring is automatically publishing the feeds to our class blogs onto the Facebook page. Which has been really great just to get that extra bit of readership for our class blogs and our students who are sharing wonderful learning.
On the other side of the Facebook page I also experimented a little bit with using Twitter with our school community. This was quite a foreign concept to most and even a few of the parents that I had in my class of students I taught and we had a couple of afternoon sessions, it never really seemed to grab parents. I put the notices in the school newsletter publishing it and promoting it and I think that Twitter was just a little bit out of the reach of many of our school community. But the best thing that happened after that I found a way where you could actually get the Twitter feed sent to a mobile phone. Fantastic because about 95% or perhaps even more of our school community has got a phone. So when parents text follow Waiuku primary to 8987 they can get all of our Twitter feeds directly sent to their phone. It has been a trial for the second half of 2011 and it has been so successful we are rolling it out school-wide at the start of 2012. Each day in the morning we post a school based events kind of round up, of course all comprehensively in 140 characters. Usually reminding parents of events that are happening or promoting something that is going on in the school. And I have heard really rave review comments, for example, a PTA meeting I walked past and a parent said, “Thank you so much for sending that text, I would have forgotten”. The feedback from parents has been that it has been so much appreciated because sometimes drawing that information out of students is not that easy.
So really, really important to us at our school to enhance that home school partnership. We have really found that not only the class blogs, but the Facebook phone and the Twitter feed going to the mobile phones as well has been really successful. Hopefully a lot of our community will be continuing to engage with us and we are really looking forward to a really strong home school partnership in 2012 that really will impact and benefit our children’s learning as well.
Rachel (@rachelboyd) is the DP and elearning leader at Waiuku Primary School. In this talk Rachel shares how she has used Facebook and Twitter to engage with her school community.
All schools crave a higher level of connection with our communities, our parents, caregivers, those who are the first teachers of our children. And we certainly know that technology make that home school partnership a lot easier.
We all know there’s stacks of evidence that shows that a positive home and school environment actually really can impact on student learning. And our school has all the usual ways of encouraging that home school partnership. So we have the school newsletter that goes home once a week, the school website, we have our email addresses available to our parents and our staff also email parents home quite a bit. Of course we have our class blogs, which are essentially the heart of the learning and not only can share learning with parents but also on a wide global stage as well. And of course, we all know that class blogs open up learning 24 hours a day to our community.
In 2010 we started experimenting. I was inspired by the work of Jane Danielson at Willowbank School where she had started a really successful school Facebook page. So with a group of parent guinea pigs, as I like to call them, we started a trial mid 2010 and worked on ways we could use that school Facebook page in the official sense to inform our community, to really keep them up to date with events that were happening and to make sure that we were having another form of engagement with them that was open, both within school hours as well as being outside of school hours.
The Facebook page was really successful, http://facebook.com/waiukuprimaryschool and at 2011 at the start of the year we launched it kind of officially and it has been growing really steadily. And a great place where parents can feel that they can ‘like’ our school and really be involved. We have lots of parents who now ask questions online, for example the other day “Can you tell me about the stationery list for 2012”. A really great place for us to keep that connection alive, even when it is the school holidays as well.
So with the Facebook page we encourage that it is for parents and caregivers only really. We have had a few students join and we have just had to have some conversations with them over appropriate use and age restrictions for Facebook. But mainly another really interesting aspect that we are exploring is automatically publishing the feeds to our class blogs onto the Facebook page. Which has been really great just to get that extra bit of readership for our class blogs and our students who are sharing wonderful learning.
On the other side of the Facebook page I also experimented a little bit with using Twitter with our school community. This was quite a foreign concept to most and even a few of the parents that I had in my class of students I taught and we had a couple of afternoon sessions, it never really seemed to grab parents. I put the notices in the school newsletter publishing it and promoting it and I think that Twitter was just a little bit out of the reach of many of our school community. But the best thing that happened after that I found a way where you could actually get the Twitter feed sent to a mobile phone. Fantastic because about 95% or perhaps even more of our school community has got a phone. So when parents text follow Waiuku primary to 8987 they can get all of our Twitter feeds directly sent to their phone. It has been a trial for the second half of 2011 and it has been so successful we are rolling it out school-wide at the start of 2012. Each day in the morning we post a school based events kind of round up, of course all comprehensively in 140 characters. Usually reminding parents of events that are happening or promoting something that is going on in the school. And I have heard really rave review comments, for example, a PTA meeting I walked past and a parent said, “Thank you so much for sending that text, I would have forgotten”. The feedback from parents has been that it has been so much appreciated because sometimes drawing that information out of students is not that easy.
So really, really important to us at our school to enhance that home school partnership. We have really found that not only the class blogs, but the Facebook phone and the Twitter feed going to the mobile phones as well has been really successful. Hopefully a lot of our community will be continuing to engage with us and we are really looking forward to a really strong home school partnership in 2012 that really will impact and benefit our children’s learning as well.
