Twitter for the WIN: Snow Day Collaboration

Each year about this time, I am working on a project around promoting & supporting Digital Learning Day.  Sometimes I struggle with this because I am steeped in working with schools who have excellent digital learning.  They are 1:1,  they know tech is a tool, not the end all be all.  They lobby often for more bandwidth, unblocking, and employ technology purposefully to extend learning and to connect with others.

Because this is my "normal" for digital learning, I was reflecting on what part of digital learning was most important or urgent for me.  Just as a was coming to a conclusion around the fact that the best part for me was connecting…I was distracted from my very deep thoughts around this by this Twitter stream…

Then I was totally sucked in!  The tweets flew back and forth with project ideas from these teachers.  The significance for me was, it began with a teacher listening to a podcast, snowed in on his farm, reaching out to his colleagues via Twitter.

You could feel the sense of urgency to get busy on in leaping from the page.  The more they went back and forth, the more the ideas grew, one of the final tweets was this…

 Later that night I see this Facebook post from one of the snowed in teachers….

Connectivity is the win for me.  Teachers connecting with each other as needed not from 8-3, connecting with broadcasters, journalists all to connect students to resources, history and possibilities.

I know these teachers, I know they had this passion for teaching and learning long before we had real-time collaboration via Twitter, but without Rex, sending out that tweet and his colleagues jumping in and responding, the idea might never have been fed, nurtured and now growing into a project.

Pinning for Parents! One More Way to Communicate!

No matter how much you communicate, it seems like communication is always an area that every learning organization needs or wants to improve. I remember getting phone calls from folks  that would go  something like this:

Parent: I had no idea that the parent night for FAFSA was last night, you need to do a better job of communicating dates like that. How was I supposed to know about it?

Me: I'm so sorry, it was in the paper

Parent: I don't get the paper

Me: Also on the radio and on our website

Parent: I don't listen to that station and I never visit the website

Me: We posted it to our Twitter feed and Facebook page

Parent: I don't use either of those

Me: It was on the sign in front of the school & sent home with your student & on the announcements

Parent: I don't drive by the school and my child doesn't tell me anything

Me: How about from now on, when something important is happening I come to your house and fold your laundry, while you make dinner and personally tell you about it?

Okay, I never really said that last line!

All kidding aside, I'm a parent of 3 kids. My husband and I both work full-time and certainly missed some important dates in our day, life is busy!

So, my motto has always been just communicate, communicate and communicate some more!

Enter Pinterest! I signed up for this tool when it came out in beta and anxiously awaited my invitation via email and when it arrived I quickly began pinning boards like recipes, garage organization, landscaping, knitting patterns etc..I've just never gotten hooked on a bookmarking tool and this one was SO working for me!

Then I had a little "aha moment" as I was talking with some friends who were in LOVE with Pinterest. This group of friends was made up of all women who aren't at all the tech addict that I am. They read books, not on e readers, they don't tweet, their computer is actually still in on a desk in their home and not right beside their chair in the family for immediate & full time access. But they were VERY engaged with this site. The visual aspect worked for them.

So, for me, Pinterest became yet another way to pull in teachers who are reluctant tech users and to reach more parents where they are! You can see ways teachers are using Pinterest in this great post from +Edudemic

I'm wondering how many schools are also pinning for their families and community! Consider boards like:

College Virtual Tours
Financial Aid
Classroom photos
Financial Literacy for Your Child
The Truth About Bullying
Helping Your Child Study
Online Safety
Learning Games
Student work
Project Based Learning explained
Standardized Test Info
Scholarships
Internships
Great books (so many sub-topics here, too!)

Pretty much any topic the School Counselor wished they had time to talk to parents and students about!

How are you using Pinterest to communicate with families? Share the link to your board in the comments! We'd love to follow you, follow our boards, too, I pin education resources as New Tech Network