Ways to Integrate Twitter into School Life

I visited a local school to help them set up a school Twitter account this morning and thought that people might find these tips I shared with them useful, based on the system I've set up and promoted at my school, Parkfield Primary:

• Only have one Twitter account for the whole school. Some people like their own class teacher or department accounts but this just becomes a jumble from examples I've seen, and the 'main' account just ends up with somebody having to retweet lots of things from different accounts before/so it can appear in the main feed that's embedded onto the website homepage. To restrict usage, only me and the SLT know the account password which we enter in for staff when they want to do an initial login to Twitter.
• Offer a range of different methods for staff to tweet to increase the likelihood of them actually tweeting - let them use both school-owned tablets/lapotops as well as their own mobile phones (which they're comfortable with). Our mobile phone policy allows for this use, as long as any photos/videos are deleted at the earliest opportunity (i.e. after they've been transferred to the school server).
• Don't be too strict about your expectations for tweets as staff will worry about getting it wrong and therefore not tweet otherwise. Praise any snapshots of learning that are shared onto Twitter as they all help to raise awareness of what's happening in the school community and improve engagement from stakeholders like parents.
• Encourage the use of hashtags to make it easy to find groups of tweets at a later date. This can be as simple as #Y1/#Y2/#Y3 etc. along with the name of the subject the tweet is about, e.g. #Art/#Computing/#History. At my school, I created this list of hashtags which also contain a few additional ones that are useful on certain occasions, although only a few people really have the need to use them.

• Prompt the more confident members of staff to include @mentions in their tweets to help promote the school and improve community cohesion - e.g. mentioning places visited on trips or organisations that are involved with the school.
• Use http://www.wordle.net/ or a similar online service to create a word collage of words associated with your school (e.g. from the motto, mission statement, parent questionnaire responses or inspection report). This can then be printed out and made into a display to use as a backdrop when tweeting celebrations and awards so they look really professional.

Well done to this super speller from #Y1! 📝 #headteacheraward pic.twitter.com/sZ2kWd6x5z

— Parkfield Primary (@Parkfield) June 29, 2018

• On your school website, add links to Twitter searches that show tweets containing specific hashtags from your school Twitter account to make it easy for visitors to easily search for examples of specific tweets. To do this, simply go to the Twitter website, type ACCOUNT: #HASHTAG OR #HASHTAG into the search box (putting your Twitter handle instead of 'account' and any hashtags you want - remembering to put 'OR' in capitals if needed), click 'Search', click 'Latest Tweets' and then copy/paste the generated URL. For example, this link will show all the tweets from my school that include #Computing in them. Doing this provides instant evidence of work that has been produced, ordered by the most recent at the top, which is a far more efficient method of celebrating/showcasing work than creating 'Big Books' that take a long time to collate and date really fast. It also has the advantage of being able to include video clips - especially useful for music and PE lessons, for instance.
• Train up pupils to do some tweeting themselves (e.g. G&T Y6 pupils or digital leaders). At my school, I've trained up children on my Technology Team to take photos on an iPad in assemblies and then tweet them afterwards during play time, using this simple prompt sheet:

• If you are lucky enough to have large monitors around your school or indeed just a laptop connected to a projector in your dinner hall, consider buying some cheap online web space and creating a scrolling page showing your tweets. If you know how to write basic HTML, feel free to copy this page I created for my school that displays latest tweets on the left and tweets we've liked on the right (e.g. awards we want to highlight or messages from other followers praising our school).
• Login to the Twitter account from a desktop computer using https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ as this allows you to schedule tweets in advance, such as reminders.

 Have you got any more ideas or tips you think others would find useful? Let me know in the comments below!