 OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. Hello, everyone, I'm Melinda Holt, and I am a PS2 tech integrator with the Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. I'd like to welcome you all for joining this OTAN Tech Talk, Spotlighting Adult Education through social media. Cynthia Eagleton from San Mateo Unified School District, Adult Education is the presenter for this OTAN Tech Talk. Cynthia, go ahead. Hi, everyone, and welcome to my Tech Talk about social media for adult education. I'm Cynthia Eagleton, and I came into social media through the doors of advocacy and community. I learned while I was doing, and that's why I know that you can learn while you're doing too. We all have different feelings about social media, and I've used it in larger or smaller ways, and I'm here to help you learn a bit more. I'm going to focus on a big picture view, because I think in some ways, it's easy to find the how-to, which I'll talk about also. It's not that hard to find the how-to, but getting that big picture view is a little bit harder to get, and I want to offer some cautions, advice, and encouragement. So social media, here's how I see it. When you're in need of something, when you didn't finish high school and you are tired of working at McDonald's and you want to get that high school diploma and you want to go to college and you want to do that next thing, what are you looking for? You're looking for hope. You're looking for advice. You're looking for a sense of connection for a community you can belong to, where you can get what you need to meet your goals, and that's what I think social media is. Social media is the stories that we're drawn to often in times of difficulty, times of good and bad things, but often in times of difficulty. So I think the job of the social media person for the school is to provide stories that provide hope and cheer and lay out those pathways to success. Thinking about storytelling, I think about, well, how do you have a story to tell? You have a story to tell because you listen to other people. So the other part of the job of the school social media person is listening, listening to your community and listening to what's going on at your school and all around it. Social media is really about relationships in so many, many ways. If you are going to tell the larger community about a new program or tell them about graduation is coming up or whatever you're doing, where do you get that information? You get it from people. And in order to get it from people, you need to have a good relationship with them. So that's really key, whether you are the person doing the social media or whether you are in charge of finding that person, hiring them and making sure they're doing a good job. You have to have a good relationship with students, with staff, with administration, with basically anybody that's handing off information to you to put out there on social media. And because we all know social media is so complicated, it's important to remember that it really involves trust and you must listen, respect what other people do and don't put out there. You must be accurate in what you put out there and you must remember the golden rule. So don't put something out there that you wouldn't want put out there if it was about you on social media. I'm sure you've all heard of the word algorithm. Different types of social media work differently, but something like Facebook, unless somebody has it set up that they see the newest thing on the feed, is going to show you in essence what is most popular. So it does help to have a lot of followers for your school. The more popular you are, the more you're gonna show up in someone's feed. And we do wanna reach people, right? We wanna provide information to our students and potential students and to our community members. We wanna be seen. So it is important that we have followers, people that have liked and followed our Facebook or Instagram or Twitter pages. How do we get the followers? Well, I think of it in terms of relationship with a capital R, which is, there's sort of a courting thing going on, right? You bring someone flowers, you say, hey, would you like to go to dinner? That's what brings them in. The beautiful pictures, the happy news, the great programs, you need something catchy so that they initially like and follow your page. But if you don't keep providing that information, it's kind of like a marriage, right? You gotta have those date nights, you gotta still bring the flowers, you're gonna lose your followers. And when you don't have many followers, that's when the algorithm is not in your favor and that's when your information is not seen. And since so many people rely on social media for information these days, we want it to be effective. And the last thing is just to, we all know this too about social media, right? We wanna be aware of posting fake news. So whatever you're sharing, when you're trying to lure folks in, make sure it's accurate. And perhaps lure is not the right word, but to invite them in. Well, social media has become a thing, right? It's a real thing, it's not new anymore. So of course, there's a lot of jargon to know. I am not gonna go over each of these words, but since you can watch this video again, I have put them all out here for you to contemplate or look them up. There are lots of social media options these days. Sort of the big mama or papa is Facebook, Instagram, super important, especially for young folks. Twitter, super important for news and politics. Blogger is kind of like having your own little newspaper. YouTube for videos, LinkedIn, professional, Pinterest, fun, TikTok, fun. Nextdoor is not yet something that schools can have their own account on. I'm gonna go over a few of these with you, the ones that I think are the most important for you to have. And if you wanna stick with just one or two, that's okay too. You don't have to do everything. You can start with one of these or you can have three but use one more. It's okay to take your time and kind of find your footing. So Facebook is sort of the institutional presence. If you're a school, that's an institution, you should have a Facebook account and you might be surprised to know that you might think people are gonna just look on the internet to find your website, but they don't always do that. They sometimes literally just go to Facebook, the same way you might go to Google and look for adult education or GED or ESL. They use it like a Google search. So it's really important that you're on there. There's lots of different things to know about Facebook. I think something that not everybody knows that's good to know about is if you have a bit of a budget for your social media or promotion, if you pay $10, it will boost your post and get it out there to more folks, to folks beyond your followers. It's advertising, right? And that's a reminder also that as with all social media, the reason it's free is because we are the product. So we all know that it is what it is. But if you pay $10, you'll reach more people. Because there is an algorithm at work, it is important to post regularly. You don't have to limit yourself to graduations and start of the semester. You can regularly post about the many wonderful things of your program. Instagram is really popular with a younger demographic. And I think it's important to have, I'm not saying you have to have it, but I think it's very helpful to have it. Something that's very important to understand is that Instagram posts square photos. And you might think, well, that's no big deal. Well, if you have a photo of your school board and your director and a student who won an award, and now you're gonna trim it down so it fits on Instagram, who are you going to trim out, right? So that's something to be aware of when you're gathering your photos for Instagram. And because Instagram is so sort of photoscentric, your photos should be good. And that kind of brings us to the truth that your social media person should be good at photography and or somebody else in your community should be so that they're providing your social media person with good photos are really, really important. And Facebook bought Instagram so you can post simultaneously to both of those things. All right, Twitter. Twitter is also very important. It is fantastic for getting news out there quickly and for finding out what is happening. And it is super important when it comes to elected officials and that's important for advocacy. So I do recommend that you have a Twitter account. You don't have to post everything to all three accounts. You can say to yourself, this feels like a Facebook post or this feels like Instagram or this feels like Twitter or you can do all three. But if you take the time to sort of play around and look at these things and look at who's posting what, you'll get a feel for what they do so that you grow in your confidence in when you wanna use each of them or if you wanna use all three. And there are ways to organize your feeds and information when you're using these such as on Twitter has something called lists so that if you are also following people on Twitter like the County Health Agency or an elected official you can organize those into lists that makes life a little easier for you. So a bit more about other forms of social media you might wanna have. I think blogger is really good to have because blogger is like a little newspaper. You know, we've lost a lot of newspapers whereas before maybe your local paper would cover some of your success stories. They aren't always there anymore. Plus it's just nice to be able to really publish a success story. So if you have blogger which is a Google product you can write up a story about an achievement of one of your students or one of your alums and you can post it there on your blog and then from there you can post it on social media. And that's super convenient because in the future you may say to yourself hey, I'd like to post that story again about someone who graduated from our pharmacy tech program because we have that program starting up again. So I wanna showcase it by posting this story. So I recommend having blogger. YouTube also recommend you can have your own school or program channel. You can have your own videos on there and you can have playlists of other videos that other people have made. So you could have a playlist of pronunciation videos or a playlist of health information like where to get your vaccine or where to get, you know whatever is important for you in your area. LinkedIn is also important for sort of institutional presence. I would, this is a good point to bring up the issue that sometimes people take names that don't belong to them. So you may be looking for an account for yourself on LinkedIn and uh-oh, XYZ Adult School has already been taken by Joe Schmoe who just took it. So even if you don't wanna use your accounts right now I recommend that you go ahead and get them so that you have those names. I don't think Pinterest is super important to have it could be fun. TikTok, I haven't used for school social media as a security could be a little iffy and or it could be fun. Nextdoor does not allow school accounts yet. It has like a city has it, county has it and so on but not schools. But I recommend that your school social media person go on next door to see what's happening. It's a good place to know what's happening which ties us back to the idea that the social media person has to be two big ears as well as one big mouth, right? You have to know what's going on in the community so that you can share that information. Strong social media, you need to know what you're saying and you should be able to say it concisely. I'm sorry I didn't talk about on Twitter has a limit of characters. So those tweets have to be short. You do not have time to write a paragraph about what's going on with your high school diploma, graduation, it has to be very short. The information should be organized and easy to share. You need to understand your audience, not just sort of who are they but who are they plural and how they intersect. People that follow your page may be potential students, current students, alums, local agencies, other adult schools. So when you're producing content that's what you call the stuff you put out there. You wanna think about who you're producing it for and who is interested in what. Images, gotta be good. Keep your posts consistent so that you are building an audience and making the algorithm work in your favor. Say what you are for versus what you are against which kind of ties into the idea of every institution, every community has strengths and weaknesses. You should know what they are as the social media person so that you can showcase the strengths and get ahead of the shadows. There's no point in being denial about the weak points of your program or your school but you should know what they are in terms of social media you should be casting a light on the good stuff you have. And social media is absolutely a place to build and connect with other networks. And it is used by organizations, by elected officials and the press. So it's really important that you have a presence on there so that you can connect with them in that way. All right, photos. Every post should have an image. If you have a post that says you are starting a new class on medical tech training and there's no photo, no one's gonna look at it. If your photo was good, they will slow down to look at it. So that sounds pretty easy. It gets complicated when it comes to things like flyers which come in the form of a PDF. You need a JPEG to post on social media. So one way I get around that is to take a screenshot of things. And that connects in with the issue of accessibility because a picture doesn't tell its own story. We'll get to that a little bit later but kind of hold that in your mind. Sometimes you don't have a photo and you're gonna use a stock photo. And who is generally in stock photos? Well, this might surprise you, but it's white people. Now, is your school all white people? Probably not, because that's not what the world is. So when you're looking at stock photos, make sure they are representational of your community. And that's another reason to create a bank of your own photos. And that's another reason for your social media person to be good with a camera or to have someone else in your community who's good with a camera. Of course, if you take your own photos, you have to think about permissions. How will you handle that? That is really an institutional decision how you deal with it. You may wanna go with verbal permissions. You may wanna go with a written permissions. You may want to think about who's most likely to show up in your photos, like staff members, student council, student ambassadors and have them sign written permission in advance of each year and then go with verbal permission with others. Whatever your institutional decision is at heart, you wanna come from a position of respect and understand that people have lives and stories that are much bigger than they share with you or should have to share with you. They're not obligated to tell you their full story and why they do or don't want their image and or their name on there. Lots of times people have no problem with having their photo on there but they don't want their name or their first name is great but they don't want their last name. So be respectful and ask somebody how would they like to have that? Would they like to have their photo on there? Is it okay to use their name first or last? Be a good listener and come with respect. Now you can tag people in a photo where you hover over their face and up pops their name. Should you do that? Basically, I think there are times when that that's good mostly not when is it good? All right, maybe your director has likes having their photo taken and it's good to get your director and sort of that school name out there so maybe it's okay to tag the director. Elected officials tend to like having their name and image out there but not if it's an unflattering photo or an unflattering situation, right? So you're gonna tag somebody's photo only when it's a real win-win. And when you do that, that gets back to relationships. It's about building a relationship with that person because they're gonna know you tagged them. All right, more on photos. So I like to use Google Photos to organize all my photos because facial recognition, it's really convenient. I can look at my thousands and thousands of photos and I can put in someone's name and I get all the photos that I've taken of that person and I can say, hey, this is exactly the best one to use. They look great in this photo. I'm gonna use this one. I can put in a date. What happened in 2017? When I make albums of events, I can go for a particular album, International Day 2016 or High School Graduation 2019. Boom, I got those photos, very convenient. I'll remember that Instagram has to be square only. I suggest communicating all this to your staff members because they will sometimes be providing you with photos but be prepared for them to forget it. So you'll have to repeat it and repeat it. Tricks that I use are taking screenshots of things when I have to and trimming them down. I've saved slideshows and Googled X as JPEGs and I use Hootsuite and other types of photo software to trim photos in needed size. Now, wait a minute, I don't know if you can read that but I can. Ah, Adult Ed is funded by the state to provide classes for disabled adults but are our websites and social media accessible? Yeah, good question, right? So accessibility. Now, because I'm self-taught, these are all things I'm trying to learn more about along the way and honestly, since my mom is deaf and my stepdad was blind, I should know even more than I do but I don't. So here's what I know and I think OTAN is a great place to find out even more. So for those folks that have visual impairments are blind, they need to have a way to know what's happening in those images. That's why we use alt text or image description. With alt text, if you hover over a photo, it will tell you if somebody has written in alt text what it is, it might say a computer screen or two people standing by a flagpole. Image description is basically the same thing but it is in the body of the post. Again, PDFs cannot be read by screen readers. So if somebody gives you a flyer and it's a PDF, first of all, you got to make it into a JPEG. Then the information in the flyer and flyers are pretty common for exciting new programs. You will now need to put that information into the body of your post or through alt text, link it to a web page where they will get all that same information. Hashtags use camel case. What is camel case? Camel case means starting the first letter of each word in your hashtag with a capital letter. So with adult education matters, it will be capital A, capital E and capital M for each of those words. Captions for videos. I have not learned enough to share with you. These are two places to explore and I need to explore more at OTAN to learn how to do that. A lot of what I have learned is by following people on social media like crutches and spice, sassy out water right, disability visibility and have learned from them. And I will tell you social media has a phenomenal amount of great information out there and great folks to learn from. And here is information from OTAN about creating an accessible website and from the US Department of Education on disability discrimination. So this is a really important issue and I suggest that you communicate it to your staff and I think it's really important that we all learn more about this together. All right, tools. HootSuite is great. This is what HootSuite looks like when you're using it. You can see these are each a different social media account like Facebook, Instagram and so on. It can be free for up to three forms of social media which is really helpful or if you wanna pay for it you can get it for about three bucks a month and have 10 social accounts and one user. With social media, you can set things up in advance. Now, you can also do that just using Facebook but it's just so easy with HootSuite. You have an actual calendar and you can set things up weeks and months in advance. You can easily drop in alt text. You can easily size things for Instagram. It has free shareable images. You can shorten links with Bitly. You can check your stats with their analytics and they have lots of advice. You'll usually get one email a week. I don't think that's flooding you out with great advice about how to do good social media. So really helpful. With Instagram, there are no live links on Instagram. So people will often say link in bio and then that's sort of like your informational. It's the part of Instagram that says Samiteo at old school or kitten lover. And when you go there to that bio section you can have a link to Linktree. And Linktree is a place where you can add all your links that go with your posts. So for example, if you're posting about a new class they would go to Linktree and it would have a direct link to go to the place on your website where you register or learn more about the class. Adobe Spark is a place to spark things up with graphics and text. And I suggest using Google News Alerts and setting the alert to your own school or your program or your district or your consortium or anything you think you're gonna wanna be growing about or talking about so that you know about it. Because sometimes you're not always in the know, right? You're doing your job but you're not constantly checking your own feed for information and that will give you a little ping so you know what's happening. All right, hashtags. There is the wonderful Ms. Branca Marchetta who used to be with OTAN and she was part of a wonderful CCAE lunch and learn webinar on legislative advocacy. I really suggest that you check it out on the CCAE webpage with lots of great information about hashtags. What I always call hashtags is the Dewey Decimal System of Social Media but of course there are probably young people that don't know what the Dewey Decimal System is. So there's a place called a library and on the back of the book, the spine are some numbers and that's how the librarian knows where to put the book and the stacks. And that's pretty much what hashtags are. It's a way to organize information. It is in essence a search tool. If somebody is looking for career education or GED or ESL, they might just go to Facebook and type in hashtag GED, hashtag Sacramento. And I hope your program pops up with information but if you didn't tag your posts with hashtags, it won't. So you really need to use hashtags with your posts. I won't say you have to do with every post but it is really good if you do. And again, you're also writing that algorithm wave to your favor when you do that. You wanna make sure it's accessible, capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag. That's camel case. You can use them in different ways. You could do it where you have your school name at the start like here is SMAS for San Mateo Adult School and then sort of the topic like SMAS ESL or SMAS Student Council or SMAS Green for Green Team. You can do sort of a broader thing that's about the topic of the subject like ESL or GED. Workforce Wednesday, every Wednesday you could have a post that relates to career or your career education program. You definitely wanna use hashtags for advocacy. Absolutely. You wanna be checking in with CCAE, Co-Abe and other organizations to know the hashtag of the year like support K12 adult ads. All right, tagging in, tagging in. Again, here's Ms. Bronca Marchetta. Bronca likes to call tagging in a tap on the shoulder because people know when you tag them in. I like to say that when you tag somebody it's amplifying them. It's increasing their visibility. When you tag somebody in, you use this little at sign followed by their handle. That's their name on social media. If you don't know what it is, go to the search bar on whatever social media you're using, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, look for them. You'll find it, you'll see the at sign with their handle. Then when you post something, you can, I'm doing my air quotes here, tag them in. So an example of when that would be handy would be an advocacy. If an assembly member visited your school for a special event and you have a beautiful photo of the assembly member and your graduates or your students doing something really wonderful. Yeah, tag in that assembly member. That's a win-win. They're gonna like it. They're doing good. They're in the community. They're connecting with your fantastic school. Your school is great. When you tag somebody in depending on their settings, you may, when you look at their feed, you may see it, but no matter what, they will know about it. So it's a relational tool. Social media is a way to promote and publicize the many wonderful things that you do at your school. These are just a few of the things that I think about when I think about promotion programs, classes, student council, clubs, student ambassadors, events, conferences, success stories. I really recommend having an archive of them that you've published on blogger and or some sort of bank so that when you need to, you have an easy way to grab those stories and post them again. I also recommend having some kind of alumni bank where when people graduate, you ask them for some basic information, of course, with their permission, name, contact information, what class or program they took. And that way, you have a way of connecting with folks in the future and you can run where are they now series? What's happening with this person now? They did our, they graduated from our ESL program, they went to community college, now they're at San Francisco State. Wow, wonderful news, let's share it. Advocacy, absolutely social media important for it. So hashtags are important. It's important to use the hashtag that is sort of the current hashtag for that time period. You definitely wanna check in with folks like CCAE and Co-Abe on that. There's lots of wonderful information out there to help you. CCAE has an advocacy hub. Co-Abe has a social media messaging center. I really advise you to look at what they're doing, get their advice and also go to their news feeds and share them. And that way you're amplifying the message and you're building that relationship between your school and that organization. Community, we need our community, right? We need information, wildfires, floods, pandemics, things are always happening. We have to share that information. I'm gonna have to cope with it to help ourselves and help our communities that we serve. So it's helpful to follow trustworthy sources of information so that you can communicate it out to your social media community such as you may have a county alert system, you might wanna follow that and then share that information. Thinking about languages is important. If you can share information out on multiple languages, that's important to do. Community events, if you share an event in the community like a job fair or a volunteer opportunity, that is helping the students that you serve and anybody else that follows your social media to get more involved in community and civic life. Sometimes if those folks are immigrants, they call that immigrant integration. We have metrics on it, that's important. Heritage and theme months and holidays, also important to share about. I like to tie those in with an event if possible. So for example, if it's LGBT month, you can post about that. Maybe there's an event at a local pride center, post that too, tie it in together. You may have a student who's new to the area and not know there's a pride center, bingo, now they've learned about it. So all kinds of great things you can do that are possible when you follow or search for all those other wonderful organizations and groups. So storytelling, as we know, is metaphorical framing. You can also use real frames. You can get an old frame, you can paint it, you can doctor it up, you can put hashtags on it and it's just really fun for photo ops that can be easily shared on social media. Announcements and updates, vacation breaks, school days that are closed, federal holidays, teacher in service registration, all important to post about, emergencies important to post about, lots of those. And again, emergency alert systems. A lot of the counties have these now or maybe every county does, but they're fantastic. And I suggest signing up for it and teaching your community how to sign up for it as well and posting about it. The website, if you don't run your school website, you should coordinate with your webmaster. Oftentimes, especially younger people will just use social media for information and not use the website. So think about how you can bring them to the website. You can take screenshots of the website on not just a laptop, but a phone because a lot of folks are just phone users. You can post links to specific pages. You can make little videos about the website with screencastifiers, screencast-o-matic and OTAN can tell you all about how to do that. That's where I learned to do it. And you can share those videos on social media. So folks to follow and amplify, that means share out their posts, make their voices their message bigger. These are some of the folks that I follow that I recommend looking into. All right, some cautions, advice and encouragement. So cautions, you wanna keep your account secure, change your passwords as needed and keep your passwords in a secure place. I don't know if I have on here and I really do recommend, and I didn't do this myself, but I recommend it, make an email account that is just going to be for social media. So it is, you know, Jane Smithy-Smith at XYZ school account that's, it's probably easiest if it is a Gmail account and everything runs off of that because I started in the Neanderthal times, I didn't do it that way, but that's the way I recommend to do it. Keep your posts accurate, understand the impact of social media. I think we all know it's really big, for better or for worse, don't share misinformation, take responsibility for what is messaged, know that you're in a position of trust. Workload and compensation is really important. If social media is treated like something kind of done on the side, who's gonna do it? And yeah, maybe you'll find someone to do it for not much money or when they have free time, but is that the person that you want doing it? You really have to think about who could bring so much to the job. Storytelling is so important. It's so important. So treat that position with respect, provide good compensation and respect. And that's really a, of course how you handle the job will bring or not bring respect, but it's also a real top-down thing from the director. The position needs to be framed as important. Burnout. Social media can end up being a real 24-7 kind of thing. So it's something you have to be on guard for. All right, a bit of advice. Set up your posts, keep them going. Regular posts, build audience. You're surfing that algorithm. Choose names you like. You can change names, but it gets complicated. Administrative respect and support makes a really big difference. Representation really matters. Who is telling your story? We all come with a story. I'm a 60-year-old white cisgendered, straight Christian woman, single mom of a black daughter with a mother who is deaf. That is going to affect how I tell stories. Who's telling your stories? Think about that. Something that you can do is something called a social media takeover where you don't actually hand over the keys. You don't give them the password, but maybe you ask the student ambassadors to create the posts for you for a week or maybe you ask the high school diploma department to make posts for you for a week and you frame it as a takeover and that's a way for you to supply a real multiplicity of voices and have some real representation happening. Create a guideline and information sheet for your staff. Follow other people. There is really great stuff out there. It's just, it's really inspiring. All right, last thing, a bit of encouragement. There's a lot of information I know, but just do your own pace. Find your way. Everybody's got a genius. You're not going to know what yours is if you don't try it. I do keep bringing up the issue of representation because it's really important. So look for how to increase that in the stories you tell and who's doing the storytelling. And if you're reluctant, reluctance has benefits. It kind of slows us down. You know, we don't drive a car without brakes. I don't think you should ride a bicycle without brakes. Brakes are good. We got gas and we got brakes using both. And if you have questions, I am here to answer them. Thank you for coming to this Tech Talk. And that is the end of this OTAN Tech Talk. Thank you, Cynthia, for a great presentation. For all of you viewing, if you would like to present a tech tool or have some tips to share with your colleagues in adult education, send OTAN an email with your OTT idea to support at otan.us. We'd also encourage everyone to subscribe to the OTAN YouTube channel where archived OTAN videos like the OTAN Tech Talks can be found. Check out the OTAN website for even more resources at www.otan.us. We hope to see you all at future OTAN Tech Talks.