Q2- Student Voices: How are you promoting student accomplishments effectively through various communication channels?
Your students do great work, and parents want to see them. At or near the top of your list of strategies needs to be promoting student accomplishments.
Divide these types of stories into two categories: Planned and sporadic. Lean heavy on the planned content first since you can control those stories and their use. Meanwhile, keep your eyes on the lookout for other student success stories, and your ears on the listen for ‘What about this student?’ Students, teachers, principals, counselors, and even parents will likely start bringing these sporadic story tips to you, and you can act on them appropriately.
I would not hold a high standard for news at first. Treat an engaging classroom activity as news. It happened, students learned, teachers taught, it’s news; not breaking news, but news none the less.
There are many ways to tell those stories, as we talked about in a recent blog. Start with those basic concepts. I would also highly recommend the book ‘Content, Inc.’ by Joe Pulizzi.
If you are overwhelmed early, then adjust. Imagine a webpage with two columns, the left one being 70% of the page. That’s where your planned stories should go, with a larger headline, teaser excerpt, and a nice photo. The right column should feature the other stories, perhaps in headline-thumbnail only style. The content behind the ‘click’ can look the same, but design a story template that can handle photos or not, video or not; pull quotes or not. And as best you can, spread the teaser headlines throughout the site. For example, a success story involving math should appear as a headline/thumbnail teaser on the math page.
In the future, we’ll have more to say about incorporating actual student voices into your channels, and presenting an entirely unique voice in promoting student accomplishments.
Enjoy! These are fun. They don’t have to take a long time or effort in editing video or writing prose. Let the students be the star.