Twitter Takeover: A Student Runs Our High School Twitter Page For A Day

As a continued emphasis of student ownership exists in our school community, we decided to allow students to run our @PCSD_PHS Twitter account for a day.

The process started in August of 2016 when our 3D group (review practices and set goals) met to outline actions for the upcoming 2016-2017 school year.  We focused on how we will promote positive aspects of our school to maintain a healthy, positive culture in our high school.

I had seen the actions of other school districts who allowed a student to takeover the school's Twitter feed and decided this is something we could do.  We set up parameters and shared them with two students that we thought demonstrated outstanding leadership in our school.  They thought the idea was fantastic. They even added that the Twitter Takeover should occur until after the football game!  This proved to be a tremendous idea as so many people liked Allison's account of the fun actions from the game!

With that we set up the second Friday of the school year as our first Twitter Takeover.

We promoted the day by placing posters around our school like the one above and digitally promoted it as well on social media and via email to the staff.

On Friday, Sept. 9 at 7:00 A.M. our first student, Allison Van Lannen met me in the library so that I could place the account and the password onto her person phone.  She didn't see the password and our agreement was that she would "log out" after the football game.  She was so responsible that she sent me a screen shot of her Twitter account after she logged out. (Great idea!  This will be a requirement for future Twitter Takeover students)  Please notice at the bottom of the picture below that only one account is on her phone. 

So was it a success?  Let's look at the Twitter Analytics.

On Friday, our student created 17 original tweets with total of 22, 200 impressions. (Impressions of number of times users saw the tweet on Twitter.) Compared to the previous Friday of two tweets (only a few adults have access to the account) and 5,000 impressions.  

Specifically,

• An Engagement Rate of 4.7%
• 37 Link Clicks (she did a great job of including pictures)
• 26 Retweets (mostly by students)
• 129 Likes
• VIEW SPREADSHEET of ALL STATS

The students and our community knew that a student was in charge of the content and were very interested in what she had to say!  Scroll through the day below or click here.

After the last tweet, Allison sent me an email and stated, "Thank you so much for the opportunity!  It's been a blast!"

Yes it was!  For Allison and our #RaiderStrong community!

The next time you are looking for some positive PR for your school, allow one of your students to run your Twitter account!

PowToon To Promote Middle School Forensics

Ms. Barszcz, Title One Reading Support Teacher, asked me if a video could be made to promote participation in middle school forensics.  While a video could be made, some challenges always arise with creating videos that include

• Time to shoot the film
• Who's going to be in the film
• Where's the setting
• Time to edit the film

Instead of filming a video for the promotion of forensics, I suggested PowToon.  I created a promotional video for our bi-weekly professional development at the high school and middle school.

Her creation rocks, was created in a few short hours, and will be shown today and tomorrow in homerooms!

Promoting Optional Technology Training For Teachers

A colleague in the education world, @helpreaders , is starting his schools version of Lunch N' Learn or Breakfast Bytes.  He wanted to know tips for making it successful.  Since we have conducted these over the school year and started year two, I thought I would outline successful strategies to include while conducting optional tech tool tip sessions.  We have Lunch N' Learn every Tuesday for high school teachers and Breakfast Bytes every other Thursday morning for middle school teachers.

• Play music as teachers enter!  Make it as festive and non intimidating as possible!  Food a few times throughout the year.
• Choose a topic to begin that they already have...Google is a great place to start!  Our topics from last year are located here.
• Create something that you can send to teachers so they can follow up on their own.  Blog posts serve as a great tool for this.
• Promote the crap out of it!  Send Google forms once in a awhile with choices of topics.  Most votes for a topic is the one that is discussed.  Plan ahead for this!
• Personal face to face interaction with teachers inviting them is THE single best way to get people to attend.
• Post, tweet, and brag about teachers who attend!

Of course videos like the one below are a great help as well.  This is our 2013-2014 promotional video for the middle school Breakfast Bytes.

VINE To Promote High School Co-Curricular Activities

VINE is a fantastic tool to make quick and short promotion videos.  I have walked past our shadow boxes promoting our school's activities and realized, "Let's make a VINE of that!"

Lunch N' Learn Brings Interactive Images

Lunch N' Learn on Tuesday will show you how to create one of these!

FunSlides HD To Promote Lunch N' Learn

FunSlides HD (discovered via @rmbyrne) is a new way to create an Animoto type video.  I used it to promote our Lunch N' Learn topic of Social Media used by our students in our classroom.

Here's the promotion:


Here's the video tutorial:

Lunch N' Learn Is Back