Q#1: Engaging Parents: What are some creative ways to utilize social media to keep parents informed and involved in school activities?
Take parents inside the classroom with photos and videos is one effective way for engaging parents through social media. Parents are not privy to how a classroom sounds and feels. They haven’t been inside a classroom in two decades or more!
One year, I wanted to create a video featuring just one second of video from every day of school. It worked really well, but in a surprising way. While I was gathering that one second of video, I also grabbed other video clips and photos. That content was posted online, along with a short paragraph detailing the topic of the class lesson, the teacher, and the why (why is this important?). In other school years, I’ve worked with a co-worker to get photos from every classroom throughout the year. We started at the top of an alphabetical list, worked with the teacher ahead of time (gladly accepted repeat visits throughout the year), and were patient when teachers were reluctant.
For the why message, start with your key academic messages for the year. Find a way to mention the most applicable focal point. When posting this story to your school website, link to a page where all of the school’s strategies are listed and explained.
It’s also important to give people a variety of ways to interact with the story. Keeping in mind your parents don’t see every single post or story, post the video on day one, then post a few photos from the same story on a later date. Or combine this story with another story or two that share a theme. Change your social media post slightly to call specific attention the teaching profession by highlighting something the teacher did to enhance the lesson. A key quote or message could be used to kickoff the social media post, and can be highlighted on the website post (pulled quote, enlarged font, etc.). Consider how you can add this story to a future email, or a school newsletter.
Play around with posting a link or not, and judge the audience reach of the social media post vs the traffic driven to your website. The zero-click strategy (as talked about here specifically related to emails by SparkToro) is growing in popularity as some social media sites are diminishing views of posts that feature a link away from their platform. (Do you want them to read your story, or only read your story on your website?)
Posting these videos and photos on social media can help affirm the fun, engaging level of learning in your school. For content creators, there are great ways for engaging parents through social media.