Schools and social media

These are a collect of links sent to or discovered by Steven Clift, E-Democracy.org Executive Director, as he prepared for webinar presentation to the National Schools Public Relations Association on using social media to engage the broader community.

• http://www.delicious.com/dowire/edtech - Stuff I've found

• • http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/09/using-facebook-to-connect-with-students.html
• • http://www.debaird.net/blendededunet/2010/09/teachers-use-facebook-to-update-parents.html

There is some good stuff here: http://www.edsocialmedia.com/. But it is mostly targeted at using social media in classrooms, rather than as a district communications and public engagement tool.

A couple of my colleagues have engaged in some good blogging. Here are a couple things from Shane Haggerty:

http://sociallearninglab.com/2010/07/25/social-media-five-steps-to-getting-your-district-started/ http://sociallearninglab.com/2010/08/31/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-social-media-school-pr-office/

Also, Richie Escovedo and Evelyn McCormack have done some stuff, but my computer is not cooperating with either of their blogs (ugh), so I can’t send you directly to their best school-PR-related posts. Here are their blogs:

http://nextcommunications.blogspot.com

http://nylady.edublogs.org/

Blogs St. Cloud, MN School Board member, http://jvonkorff.blogspot.com/ Chicago parent advocate, http://pureparents.org/ who is one of the founders of Parents Across America, new national group at http://parentsacrossamerica.org/ (looks to me like they're using wordpress) on facebook, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=123352677681840 twitter http://www.twitter.com/ParentsAcrossAm/

Parents United has a facebook page, 445 members; at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Parents-United-for-Public-Schools/139921206266 and uses Twitter, http://twitter.com/marycecconi

Here's a list of all state and community-based (discovered) parent citizen education groups in MN (not school-based) http://www.parentsunited.org/Organizations.html

e.g., MN PTA has a facebook group, 41 members http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=48126927210

School levy sites; I didn't think about this yesterday, but buried in the levy archive at http://www.parentsunited.org/LevyArchive.html are links to the community sites/facebook groups for local levys (when found) many get taken down after the levy is over;