5 Uses for Twitter for Your School

My dirty secret is that I’m getting rapidly sucked into the world of Twitter. Even when I originally joined I didn’t really understand the many different ways it could be used.

Here are just five ways your governing body and/or school could be using Twitter.

1) To Communicate with Parents

Send a newsletter home with a child and there can be at best an evens chance it will ever make it to a parent. With Twitter you can communicate with your parents direct, they can ask you any questions they have, and you can do it in a timely fashion. Now more saving all your news up for one burst – you can let people know as it happens.

2) Connect with the Local Community

Equally as important Twitter can help you reach out to your local community with news of your extended services / community cohesion activity, and do so at no cost. There are a number of different services out there that will help you find local Tweeters, or you could just ask your parents for recommendations.

3) To Find Helpful Organisations

It’s mind boggling the number of charities and businesses that are now on Twitter, many of which you may never have known existed. Twitter makes it easy to connect with these groups, and also to ask followers for help and advice. This includes suppliers too.

4) For Staff Development

Twitterati may have already experienced Ukedchat – a weekly hour long chat about all things education. This is great and always interesting (if manic). Just as your staff may attend local networking meetings, on. twitter they can network and share ideas with like minded colleagues across the world!

5) With Students to Improve Learning

As a social network there are esafety issues here so vigilance is required, but Twitter can bring an interesting dimensions to lessons. Others will be better placed to go through what these are in detail (I’m not a teacher myself) but I have friends who’ve used Twitter to tweet plenaries to vote in class and to discuss activities in real time. It’s a brave new world out there and Twitter is a tool at the forefront of it.

It would be great to hear from you if you’re using Twitter already as a governor (I’m @supergovernor) and/or if you have any other uses to add to the list.

Advertisement