How to Create a Positive Social Media Brand as a School or District
Building an inspiring culture of digital leadership that engages teachers, parents, and students must begin with the leaders of the learning community.
From a distance, schools are recognizing the reality of remote learning becoming part of everyday school moving forward. Whether it be to start the new school year, partially be a part of it, or remain for the fall and beyond, online learning is going to be “the new norm” in some fashion. A fresh conversation transpiring among educators is the need to develop a curriculum for Digital Leadership.
There is a growing concern among teachers when it comes to “going live” with their students and classes. The cry from parents is to “bring the classroom back” in a virtual sense, but questions about privacy have educators hesitant to press record. The knee-jerk reaction is to remind society how rampant cyber-bullying and harassment is online. If you don’t believe me, or you are saying, “not our students,” try this social experiment with your students:
Poll a department, lets say English classes, virtually for a day. Host Zoom or Meets live and ask students to scroll through their favorite social platform (probably going to be Snap or Insta). Ask students to find 10 negative comments, posts, pics, likes, retweets, from students. Odds are it will take 60–90 seconds at best. You will see students laughing as they scroll, some may be embarrassed, some even in shock at what they are realizing was posted in some fashion about someone else. Next, ask them to do the same thing, but find 10 positive posts on social. What you will witness is their index fingers swiping up for minutes on end, desperately seeking for positive posts.
As someone who has experienced (first-hand) online negativity, I feel justified in advocating for teachers and schools to stay offline, to not “go live” and stay off social. It’s easier, simpler, or the dreaded, “it’s how we’ve always done things” in our school answer.
- Why not have students email responses to an email from a teacher?
- Why bother putting in so much time to stay “connected?”
The answer has been something I have been speaking to middle and high schoolers about years before “Digital Citizenship” was a snazzy catch phrase in the education world. My take has always been to run towards, not away, from promoting positive posting. Branding students to be positive citizens, on AND offline, is the key to embracing digital leaders who will make sound decisions online so they can make sound decisions offline as well.
The post-COVID student needs to embrace digital leadership. Schools need to incorporate this into their curriculum moving forward, no matter if we are remote or not. Distant Learning comes with hesitancy and fear from both teachers and students — not because of a lack of ability to achieve success, but because of a lack of experience embracing being “social” online. If we don’t take advantage of educating our students and teachers on the importance of using social media to connect as a school community, we will miss out on the opportunity to lower the rate of cyberbullying, the rate of negativity, and the rate of haters on social media.
It is our job as educators to stay current with modern trends in education, and now is the time to embrace social branding. School districts who work together to educate all stakeholders on promoting positivity online, will revitalize their school culture and create a positive social brand that lends to a climate that partners with the entire community.
How to Create a Positive Social Brand as a School or District
- Choose 1 social platform for the entire district to communicate on. Twitter is the easiest and most inviting for school purposes. It offers text and pics, likes and retweets for contests, challenges and promoting positivity.
- Ask Administration to create Twitter handles using their titles and names (so they can be discoverable online by students, teachers, parents). Next, ask teachers to do the same, followed by sports teams, clubs and departments. This will create a universal online network of communication parents can join in and follow.
- Create a school and district #hashtag so all posts are easily found when searching (it acts as an online folder if you will). Make it positive and attached to your motto, mascot, vision, etc.
- During remote learning, create weekly Kindness Challenges of Random Acts of Kindness that clubs, grades, teams, teachers and parents can all get involved in. This is a great way to introduce digital leadership to your school’s community.
- Celebrate The Class of 2020, Senior Spring Athletes, Awards Nights…
In order for digital leadership to be effective, there has to be buy-in from “up top.” Having your Superintendent and building principals in the district consistently active online will lead to participation at all levels: students, teachers, and parents.
The goal should be to look back a year from now and have your school standing in the positive digital footprints started during Distant Learning.
Leave a legacy your alumni will be proud to look back on, maybe even retweet.
