The latest thing to be trending on Twitter is not a hashtag. Rather, district 214 staff members adopting the social media site seems to be a growing fad.
Many Elk Grove High School staff members have created Twitter accounts to communicate with students and the community. Some of these accounts are professional and specific to the staff member who created it. Others are more general and are used to foster communication within a classroom or team. District and school officials aim to promote school events and recognize individual achievements in their specific accounts.
“I thought it’d be a good way to recognize what people are doing here,” Principle Paul Kelly (@EGPrinciPaul) said. “Honestly, I thought it would be a good way to raise visibility of activities and classroom stuff.”
District 214 shares a similar goal in the use of professional Twitter accounts. Erin Brooks, Assistant Director of Community Engagement and Outreach, hopes to build upon District 214’s existing Twitter account as well as school-specific accounts to create a common dialogue to share the district’s stories with the community.
“We already had a district account, so we could build on that. And as part of our effort to build on that, my goal is to create a consistent language across the schools,” Brooks said. “So, my hope was to have an official Twitter account for each school and get us all on the same page.”
Brooks’s effort to increase external communication has been met with an increase of roughly 350 followers to the district 214 account (@District214). Brooks regards the increased use of #214Hero as a major accomplishment.
“The thing that I really love is we’ve encouraged the 214Hero hashtag. And we’ve encouraged those tweeting from the school accounts to talk about teachers and staff who go the extra mile and who are really an everyday hero for our students,” Brooks said. “If you go and search on Twitter, there’s a growing number of posts there; people are really using that hashtag.”
District and school specific accounts are not alone in their success. More specific accounts, such as @EGHSCounselors, run by Val Norris, Assistant Principal of Student Services, have brought significant gains to their users.
Norris has noticed more kids using the College and Career Center. Additionally, she has sensed a change in school atmosphere ever since she created @EGHSCounselors.
“I thought it was a great way to connect with kids and give them information that they need right now for college or any other issues that come up in the counseling department,” Norris said. “I think it’s good for school climate because we do post funny things too, and I just think that it does humanize teachers a little bit as well.”
Norris also feels that certain boundaries should be respected; in particular, she does not feel that it is appropriate to follow a student.
“I think that there is a boundary there,” Norris said. “I wouldn’t want to follow a student because you never know what that kid is going to tweet out because they don’t have the same guidelines that we do.”
This sentiment largely reflects the feelings of most staff members. Kelly takes this caution one step further when using his professional account.
“I don’t follow any teachers, and I talked to the teachers about that. So, they might follow me to see what’s there, but I wouldn’t want anyone to feel like they’re being watched,” Kelly said. “Same thing with students; that wouldn’t be appropriate at all. Even though it’s a professional account, that’s a personal account for a student, and it would just be inappropriate for me to follow what students are saying in their world.”
Although classroom specific accounts follow similar guidelines, they also create a more active, intimate dialogue between students and their teacher.
Linda Ashida, Spanish teacher, has created the @EG_APSpanish account in addition to her professional account. She tweets classroom resources and reminders to her students alongside advice and news from graduates to expand the class’s learning community.
“It’s been a really amazing way to…foster collaboration and communication with my students, and not my just current students,” Ashida said. “I really love that idea of collaborating and just learning.”
Senior Rebecca Evett has taken advantage of the opportunity to mix her educational and social lives. Evett is excited to see staff members using technology as students do and enjoys receiving school-related information this way.
“They’re fun. The counselor one lets me know about college stuff and what’s going on. The Spanish one is fun and it makes you do more with Spanish outside of school with something you use everyday,” Evett said.
Some coaches have decided to use Twitter in an even more specific way. Jon Rowley, girls golf coach, sometimes uses @EGGirlsGolf to give his players information regarding departure times for games. However, he also tries to expand to a deeper, more beneficial line of communication.
“I think it’s another cool way for us to publicize our program, and people can see how we’re doing, particularly teenagers at the school,” Rowley said. “Girls golf is something that we’re always trying to build and get more kids to come out for. You know, at Elk Grove for a while, we didn’t even have a team. So that’s another reason behind having it, just so more kids can see it and say ‘oh wow, they’re doing really well,” or “this looks like it’s a fun thing to go out for.”
Rowley believes that sport-related Twitter accounts have the potential to catch-on.
“I think it’s like anything. You just kind of are always teetering on ‘is this cool or not?’” Rowley said. “I mean, teachers, we’re just like kids. If it’s cool, then oh yeah, everyone is going to start doing it.”
Staff members like Chris Rugg, Math/Science Division head (@ChrisRugg), are confident that educational and professional Twitter accounts are an “awfully obvious” step in communication and will be embraced in the future, regardless of the form they take.
“I definitely think it’s here to stay, whether it’s in that context [school-wide use] or some other context, that continuous line of communication is not going to go away. The line between student and teacher really is turning into more of a partnership than it is here’s the teacher on one side; here’s the student on the other side,” Rugg said. “It’s much more of a communal field both within the classroom and in terms of how information gets passed between both parties.”
By Katie Weber