my version of transparent, collaborative leadership...with a Teamann twist

Twitter me this…why use Twitter for school communication?

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Twitter me this…

Why would an administrator want to take on the headache of using social media with their parents and community?  What if I asked if you, as an administrator, would like to have more communication with your parents, keep them updated and alerted to any and all important school news, while only taking up a fraction of your time?

Twitter provides just such an opportunity. Our parents today are busy.  It’s not always like it used to be with a mom waiting at home with a snack to go through a weekly folder and help with homework. Today’s mom and dad’s may be working more than one job. They may be working late into the evening. They may have more than one student to come home and help. Even the most traditional of families can become buried underneath the responsibilities of soccer, dance, and Girl Scouts. Recognizing the different dynamics of what our students are going home to can help guide how we communicate with them all. Providing the same information in as many mediums as possible can only help ensure that we are reaching as many parents as we can.

How do I envision Twitter as an asset? It allows your tech savvy parents who are involved with social media a way to get current and timely information. Sending reminders about picture day, school closures, make-up days…things that parents are concerned about can be short and sweet.

In a world where anything can happen, and information travels SO fast, Twitter allows for timely communication. Emergencies happen and while not life pressing, to a parent, having a concern immediately taken care of can be gratifying. We had a situation one year where there was a fire in the kitchen. No students were ever in danger, but to the neighborhood surrounding us, seeing the campus swarmed with fire trucks and district personnel can be unnerving. An “all call” went out to parents that afternoon, but we had several concerned calls in the interim. Twitter would have calmed & clarified the situation immediately.

Every week a stack of reminders are sent home. Tests, pictures, events, policies, etc…we send them home in bulk at certain times of the year. A tweet is only 140 characters. Short and sweet.  “ Free dress tomorrow.”  “Don’t forget to return your library books.” “ 2nd grade field trip, bring your lunch!” All the things a teacher wishes she could call and remind each parent of the day before. May not be worth another sheet a paper, but a tweet? Absolutely.

Not all of our parents are on Twitter. Recognizing that there would be a learning curve is ok. SOME of our parents are in that space. SOME might be inclined to look into it knowing that it was offered. SOME might take advantage of the “Fast Follow” option that Twitter provides, which sends texts of tweets. In fact, sending a text was originally the only way users could tweet. This is why tweets are 140 characters — they need to fit into a text message. Anyone in the US can receive Tweets as texts on their phone even if they haven’t signed up for Twitter. This is a simple way for people to get information they care about in real-time.

If you don’t have a Twitter account (and don’t want one!) you can still find out what is happening through these text messages. (Standard messaging rates apply.)

To get started text: “Follow @username” to 40404 and you will start receiving tweets from that user on your device. You can turn off receiving updates by sending “STOP @username” to 40404. 

They won’t need a Twitter account or to sign up for anything. This will require some training, but it’s difficult to find someone who doesn’t text these days. Providing training would be worth the results each year. We started every meeting with a simple “Hey everyone! Pull out your cellphone! Let’s make sure you are getting hot off the press info from us!”

Twitter is not the silver bullet that will allow seamless communication between school and home. What it will do is provide another opportunity for educators to reach out to the parents and attempt to bridge the disconnect between school life and home life. If it also opens a door to discussing social media, cyber behavior, or having an online presence? Even better.

 

Tweetingly,

Amber

Are your thoughts tweet worthy?

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I will always remember the first conversation I had with a professional colleague about Twitter. I’d attended BLC and been swept away in a Twitter tidal wave by Liz Davis and Lisa Thumann. (This also, coincidentally enough, was where the @8amber8 moniker came from…who knew this tool would become my go to PD reference and I’d have to explain that bad boy all the time!)

It came up in conversation that no one wanted to know what I’d had for lunch that day, that Twitter was pointless. This thought has now gone by the way side, 🙂 and there are 243 million monthly active users. While some may still talk about their lunch, it has become a place to share and be shared with. Twitter is an outstanding communication tool for three main reasons:

  • Twitter enables you to release brief, 140 character, gems of greatness to the world.
  • Twitter encourages conversations outside of your silo.
  • Twitter is word of mouth “genius sharing”. Great ideas get shared, and seen, and built upon.

Are you worried you don’t have anything to say? Wonder if your ideas are tweet worthy?

Here are 5 things you can tweet about….

1. Edu Wins: Share the good things happening on your campus. Break down the walls of and allow others to see what is happening. Tell your story. There are GREAT things happening every day in our schools, we should want to invite everyone to know how amazing our students and teachers are. An elephant can be eaten, one bite at a time, and some of our tweets may be those bites that show others just what we do.

2. Great ideas: My favorite event we’ve done this year has been “Tacos & Technology”, an idea I learned about from Sam LeDeaux, a principal in Chicago. While I love both tacos & technology, I’d never thought about putting them together for a parent night until he shared what is campus had done.

3. Support: A PLN becomes your educational support system. Need to ask a question and not feel judged? Need affirmation that what you are thinking or doing is what’s best for kids? There are people there to support you…and vice versa. Support others!

4. Questions: If you’ve ever read a thought-provoking article and wanted to discuss it with someone, here’s your chance. Tweet the link and start a conversation. Wonder how to make genius hour work? This space allows you have dialogue with other educators, other practitioners, who have tried it. Learn from them!

5. Who are you? George Couros has written about the difficulty in keeping your personal and professional life separate. Educators are persuaders. So much of our professional life is inspired by the personal connections we have. It’s impossible to keep those separate and yet simultaneously woven into the relationships we develop. You can’t know my heart if you don’t know a little of whats inside of it.

4 things that you shouldn’t ever tweet about, 🙂

1. Negativity: There are enough negative people in the world. We don’t need anymore like that. Any donkey can knock down a building, but it takes a special donkey to build one up.

2. Rants: Same as above. Ranting and raving will not solve anything. This isn’t that kind of space, and it undermines our goals in education: to lift up, inspire, and to teach.

3. Profane or inappropriate thoughts, images, jokes: The best (and safest) social media advice I’ve ever been given came from our communications coordinator. If it isn’t something you’d be ok with on the headline of the newspaper or happening in your school lobby, don’t post it. He didn’t say don’t DO IT, he said don’t post it, anywhere. There’s enough that can happen in life that we don’t, as an educational system, need to be sharing publicly things that could damage our professional image or efficacy. That’s a lesson to learn the hard way. Just ask her, her, or her... (Three cases have gone to the Supreme Court involving educators and free speech, and all three lost, by the way.)

4. Remember your purpose! If you’re on Twitter to learn, to share, and to grow professionally, as defined by your intent and bio, then do that.

 

What of your reasons have I missed? Not jumped into the Twitterverse? What’s holding you back?

 

Tweetly,

Amber

 

Weekly Update: Teacher Leaders…are you cultivating? #SAVMP

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One of the opportunities I’ve been able to take on this year with George Couros is the #SAVMP collaboration project. Each week we post weekly updates to work with administrators and their team of mentees to help develop leadership and embrace the challenges that comes with the responsibility of leading. This week we discussed teacher leaders and I’m cross posting it here.

 

When thinking about ways to bring about change or attempting to cultivate something new for your campus, where do you begin? Do you start with a formal staff meeting? Where you stand in front of the group and  tell them what you want to see happen?

How effective has the been?

Conversation at dinner last night talk centered around those rockstar teachers on your campus. The ones who are willing to go above and beyond because its what should be done for kids, not because they are getting paid to be there. When I think about some of the crazy ideas that I wanted to see happening in classrooms, I think about the teachers I went to talk  with to make that happen. When I wanted to see a bulletin board focused on the digital tools happening in the classroom, I knew exactly where to go to make that happen.  This teacher knew my expectations, knew my vision, and what my end goal was with the something as simple as a bulletin board. (Vision! It all come back to vision!) I also had to balance what was asked of this particular rockstar in order to not detract from her teaching, or her relationships amongst the staff. Todd Nesloney  wrote an inspiring post about how he embraced that role on his campus.

Who are your teacher leaders? How are you lifting them up and empowering them to be an example without ostracizing them from the rest of your staff? Share your strategies with your mentees this week so they can start keeping an eye out for ways to embrace and lift up those around them.

Have a great week!

 

Amber

 

Have a book study via Twitter? Yes we did!

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Time is a hot commodity for anyone, but especially for teachers at the beginning of the year. Knowing this when it came time for our staff development plans, the idea of book study made us yawn. How can you spice up a book study, engage your staff in a digital environment, and promote a digital presence?

You have a book study chat on Twitter!

We started by choosing a book we knew would have an immediate impact on classrooms, “Teach Like a Pirate”. It set the tone for the whole inservice, and we were able to go with a “pirate” theme. (I love a good theme!) Teachers were given their books with an intro the first day we came back. We divided the book into 4 parts, gave the dates that each part was to be completed by. So as not to overwhelm, because this was a lot of teachers first foray into Twitter, we decided there would be just three questions for each part. I gave a very basic session on the in’s and out’s of Twitter. We created our accounts and wrote our bios, making sure they represented our educationally interest. We talked about hashtags, chats, and the purpose of this “global” learning space.

The book study questions were to be answered via twitter, using the hashtag #WTLAP. (Watson Teach Like a Pirate)
We used a Q1, A1 format to answer on the date given for each set of questions. The official #WTLAP chat was from 8-8:30pm, but they had 24 hours to respond to the questions before I “storified” the results.
This allowed everyone to scroll back through the tweets.
http://storify.com/amberteamann/wtlap-book-study-chat-9-9-2013.html
What did this accomplish?

  • It created a presence on Twitter for our staff, which helped lead to the next step of creating our #WMST hashtag, to start to document our #eduwins for all of our stakeholders.
  • The awareness of others to follow, based on the conversations happening, built a base for many teachers to create their own PLN.
  • It allowed other educational connections to be formed. We had several educators from around the world join in our chat which removed the “walls” from around our building.
  • Teachers were able to think and creatively share their responses for an audience of more than just our staff, including author, Dave Burgess who joined us our first night.
  • We were able to spend time in our campus based learning meetings focused on other instructional matters, since this was all done on their own time.
  • Teachers who needed support were able to ask and recieve help privately, on their own ability level. This was an incredible opportunity to offer my help and really get to know our teachers.

Here’s our handout, #WTLAP.

Special thanks to Chris Kesler, who lent me his official TLAP chat questions that we were able to modify for our staff.
chattingly,
Amber

What do you do for the unloved? Be a LOVE NINJA!

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In every classroom there are students who don’t quite fit in. They may be more mature than their peers, or less mature than their peers.

They may dress differently.

They may learn differently.

They may laugh differently.

 

Sometimes they may BEHAVE differently. 

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It doesn’t take much a for a student to ostracize themself from their peers. How do you foster relationships? How do you help students with social skills? Students without siblings, or in a new environment may need some additional support. A former co-worker I had used to do “Lunch Bunches” where once a month she’d bring in students that needed social skill help along with  some of the more established students, and try to develop relationships.

I saw an article posted on Facebook from a friend. It was such a great example of how important dealing with some of these ostracized students can be, and why as a teacher, it should be on your radar too.

Every Friday afternoon C’s teacher asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student whom they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her. And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, C’s teacher takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her and studies them. She looks for patterns.

Who is not getting requested by anyone else?

Who doesn’t even know who to request?

Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated?

Who had a million friends last week and none this week?

You see, C’s teacher is not looking for a new seating chart or “exceptional citizens.” C’s teacher is looking for lonely children. She’s looking for children who are struggling to connect with other children. She’s identifying the little ones who are falling through the cracks of the class’s social life. She is discovering whose gifts are going unnoticed by their peers. And she’s pinning down- right away- who’s being bullied and who is doing the bullying.

You can read the whole article here. (She also talked about what a “Love Ninja” this teacher was, which has given me a whole new goal in life. I want to be a LOVE NINJA!) There are students who truly need our help to be connected. They need to know how to be a friend in order to have a friend. I shared with a teacher this week how absolutely eye-opening it was for me in high school when a boy I wanted to ask to a Sadie’s Hawkins dance told my friend that I was “too immature” for him. It was such a self actualization moment for me….I had no idea. Students can be completely unaware of how they are coming across to their peers and it  falls to us to help them see.

Look at your classroom…or your staff, this week. Are there connections to be made? Is someone slipping through the cracks? I challenge you to help make the unlovable feel loved. 

 

Love ninjaN,

Amber