 Being connected has always been important in our world. What has changed over time is how we connect with others. As explorers traveled to new lands or pioneers traveled west, they brought the best goods and traditions from their homelands to share with those they met. They took great pride in sharing what they had accomplished and built upon their successes with the new tools that they had at their disposal in the new land. Schools are no different. Over the years, we have found new ways to connect stakeholders outside of our walls with what is going on inside in hopes of creating a positive school culture. We have discovered that having parents involved in a student's life tends to lead to a more successful student experience in school. That's where parent-teacher conferences started. Schools also started stepping out into the community, going to places where people were to show off what they'd been working on. When was the last time you went to a parade that didn't showcase at least one school marching band? In the 1990s, after Al Gore invented the Internet, schools realized that having a presence online allowed parents, both current and potential, the ability to check out their school without having to step foot inside it. There were still face-to-face opportunities to connect with the public, sporting events, music concerts, curriculum nights, but appropriately populated websites allowed adults to get an idea of what the school is about. Fast forward to today, 2015, where, at the intersection of technology and communication, you have social media. Again, the importance of communication hasn't changed, but the tool with which we reach our audience has. Whether we like it or not, a lot of people, but not all, are utilizing social media as a way to interact with a broader audience. According to Facebook's 2015 first quarter earnings announcement, 936 million people check Facebook every day. Schools, companies, anyone can build a network of interested individuals just by taking advantage of the widely used social media platforms. HubSpot, a company that specializes in business marketing, published last year that 84% of participants found increased traffic with as little as 6 hours per week invested in social media marketing. My point in sharing this is not to compare schools to businesses, as we have very different goals. Instead, think about how important marketing is to a business and how little time those businesses report spending on social media. Educators don't need to spend a lot of time on social media in order to see gains. We just need to be consistent with relevant content. So how many different places do your parents and students go for information online? A lot. William Chamberlain, a middle school teacher and self-proclaimed Edgy Punk, brought up this great point during a recent episode of Dads and Ed, a podcast I co-host. We don't need to be every place that every kid is at. This video simply talks about four of them. Those four will change, but as I mentioned earlier, the need for us to communicate will not. Before I dive into some suggestions, I feel compelled to mention that nothing I say here overrides your district's acceptable use policy, or AUP. Please read it and talk with your administrator prior to starting a school-focused social media presence. Due to people not using common sense, districts have implemented AUPs as a way to cover the districts behind should one of their staff members do something dumb. If you ever want an example, just read the news. There are far too many both inside and outside of education. Let's be clear, though. Social media didn't cause these issues. How the person involved acted or what they did caused the problem. There are four main online spaces that I would encourage you or your school district to explore. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Flipboard. From an entire school district perspective, your audience is in all those places, so I encourage you to dip your foot into them. Who takes care of that depends on the size of your district and the staff available. Towards the end of the video, we will talk about how some of those tools can work in tandem with each other, so the lifting isn't as heavy. As a classroom teacher, I would not expect you to do all four. If you are not currently doing any of them, I would most definitely pick one to start with and go from there. Where and what you teach greatly influences what I would suggest to each of you. So while I won't give you, the person who is listening, a specific recommendation, I hope that as you will listen, you will pick up on a place to start. I would also strongly suggest that you ask around. If your intended audience is students, ask them what platform they would interact with you on. If your target audience is parents, ask them either via a quick Google form, piece of paper at conferences, or see if your district has used a tool like Brightbytes to research what social media tools parents are using. Simply asking the question could save you a lot of himming and hawing over where to begin. Facebook is by far still the most populated online social media tool out there. Families of your students make up a large number of Facebook users. Even though it is starting to become not cool to be on Facebook, research in our district shows that students still check their accounts on a regular basis. The benefit of Facebook is that you can easily post pictures, video, text, and links without the limitations of other networks. It is also the most common. Therefore, you are likely to have more engagement because your audience would be most familiar with it. Likes and commenting in Facebook help it to show up in other people's feeds, meaning more people have the opportunity to look and interact with what you post. That's not always the case with other social media tools. There are a couple ways that you can go about creating a presence on Facebook. One way is to create a separate profile. Using usually your school email, teachers will set up a Mr. Allen or Mrs. Smith professional account and will friend parents just like you do with a regular account. At the end of the year, you clean out your friends and then friend the new parents the next year. The drawback of this route is that if you have a personal Facebook account, you will be logging in and out of Facebook regularly. Another way for classrooms to use Facebook is to create a Facebook group. Many schools suggest secret or closed groups to maintain some privacy. This can be done either from your professional Facebook or your regular personal Facebook account. The Facebook group allows most of the same features as a professional profile. Most districts will require, or all but require, you to lock down your personal Facebook account if you choose to use it. I've never held a strong preference as to which account you should use. The last option is creating a Facebook page. This is generally geared toward school districts, buildings, or after-school activities that use Facebook to promote themselves. Pages are designed to be public sites that allow for dialogue back and forth between you and your audience. Another plus for a group or page is that they allow for multiple administrators, meaning you can share the wealth when it comes to populating your online presence. If you monitor the fastest growing social networks, you'll notice Instagram has regularly been at or near the top of that list. Where it ranks sometimes depends on the time of year or what metrics different websites use. Regardless, Instagram is quickly becoming popular because of its ease of use and the fact that it focuses on pictures. Say what you want about what some people post on it. Instagram can be a powerful tool for quick glimpses into a classroom along with a short summary of what we are looking at. Unlike Facebook, it isn't a great way to share resources or links. It's simply a great way to share pictures. Also, unlike Facebook, it's got a pretty simple privacy settings. Whether private or you're not. Because Instagram is owned by Facebook, they work pretty well together. In the Instagram settings, you can set it up to post to a profile or a page, but not a group. So if you create a personal profile that you have friended parents on, it's very easy to make one post in Instagram also post in Facebook. Probably the biggest downfall to Instagram is the avenues for posting. Facebook has a bunch of different apps that allow you to post to your feed. Instagram has two. One is Instagram itself, and the other is the two-and-a-half star-rated Hipstomatic app. Hipstomatic only posts. It does not show you your stream or any of your comments or likes. You can use the web to see likes and make comments, but you can't post your Instagram feed from the web. Twitter allows you to have multiple accounts on the free Twitter app, but Instagram makes you sign out of one account and then sign back in as a second account. So while it's simple to use, it takes some planning to manage multiple accounts if you have them. You may say, I don't have time for this. Who said you had to do it? Philip Cummings, a teacher in Memphis, has a chief Instagram officer, aka CIO, in his classroom. Regardless of the tool you decide on, get the kids involved in sharing your story. If you are in a primary classroom, maybe you make it a group activity prior to the end of the day. Maybe it's a job that middle school students have to apply for in your class. There are many ways to do it that don't involve you being the only one. Twitter is another social media app that has taken the world by storm. From the hashtags game on Jimmy Fallon to resource sharing in weekly chats like KinderChat, Twitter has integrated itself into many different social arenas. Users on Twitter can follow specific accounts which show up in their streams similar to Facebook. Hashtags are used as a way to group similar thoughts or topics together and can be another great place to find like-minded people to follow. Craig Madura, who you can find on Twitter, at Mr. Madura, compares hashtags to TV channels. Find ones that interest you, and use a service like TweetDeck that lets you access them quickly. Conversations on Twitter can be started around 140 character posts, although it's difficult to get too in-depth. The lack of depth hasn't stopped Twitter from being a great place to reside. In a secondary classroom, teachers can use it to post assignments or have their own chats to get ready for tests, while extracurricular clubs and groups use Twitter to share updates and inspirational messages. Even in the elementary, a classroom account can be used to tweet out student thinking or a summary of the day's activities. Whether parents have a Twitter account or not, they can still check the class's public Twitter feed. If you have parents who don't want their kids online, those students can be excluded from participating in the post or getting that job in the classroom. Twitter does allow you to have multiple accounts linked to a single free app, so switching back and forth is very easy on a mobile device. TweetDeck is also a great web tool for following multiple streams of information by creating columns for different accounts or search topics. Finally, how do we get all of that information to people who may not be on all of those platforms? There are a few different ways. Creating a Flipboard magazine has been my favorite tool for combining social media feeds, newspaper articles, TV news clips, as well as, and most importantly, the student and parent perspective of district happenings into a single place. Users can access Flipboard from a free mobile app or via any web browser. We have also added a widget on our district website, so if you visit the website, you can quickly see the latest information about us without us having to update the website. You can invite multiple people to contribute to your magazine, further spreading out the workload. Content is added to your magazine either through a Chrome extension or share buttons on mobile devices that have the Flipboard app installed. What you get is a beautiful looking, no cost magazine that takes very little effort on your end to maintain. Another tip I need to share is ways to automate your posts. If you go to Facebook.com slash Twitter, you can have posts from your Facebook profile or any pages that you are an admin of automatically linked to a Twitter account. Every time you post, it goes to Twitter. If you are over 140 characters, it will include a link to your Facebook page. Many schools focus on their Facebook page and essentially let it spill over to their Twitter feed. That's fine. Just don't forget to be on Twitter and interact with users there. You can also go the opposite way. If you go to Twitter.com, navigate to your settings, you'll see an app section on the left hand side. There you can connect your Facebook page to your Twitter account. That's great, but make sure to just pick one of those so that you don't create an infinite loop of the same post. Decide which one you prefer to spend your time and connect there. With Instagram, you can go in the app settings and link other social media accounts. It's not automatic, but it's just a click of a button to post to those other sites. All of that is great, but if you can't find exactly what you need, I recommend you check out If This Then That, that ties your social media profiles together. With IFTTT, you can create recipes that say, if something happens here, do something over there. For example, you can set up a recipe so that anytime you post something to Instagram, a copy of the picture is uploaded to Flickr. Or, if you don't want it to happen all the time, create a recipe that says, if I use a certain hashtag, do this. For our district Twitter account, I have set up one that says, if my tweet includes the hashtag FB, create a post on our Facebook page. The nice thing is you don't always have to know what you're looking for when you go to ifttt.com. You can browse by the hundreds of channels they have to see how other people are using the service. It's a great resource to help you save time. As I said at the beginning, being connected with community stakeholders is a very important piece of the educational environment. It's an essential piece to create a successful, positive learning culture in your school district. Someday, even Facebook will go the way of the Conestoga Wagon, no longer needed but held in historically high regard. Something new will someday take its place and something new after that. We will always have a desire to communicate. It will continue to be a necessity. Hopefully this session has given you some ideas on how to utilize technology effectively for yourself, your parents, and your students.