education

I sat down today with Pam Larson, the Director of Mountview Christian Preschool, to talk Facebook. She wanted to set up a presence for the school on the site, and as the happy parent of a preschooler there, I volunteered to help.

Goals
The first step in any good Facebook strategy is to identify who you want to communicate with, and why.

"I know that many of our parents are using Facebook, even more than e-mail," Pam told me. "I want to set up a way to communicate with them there. I'd also like to use it as a way to recruit new students to the school."

Mountview has two goals:
1. To communicate with parents
2. To use the site as a recruiting tool for additional students

Off to a good start - two concise goals.

Group or Page?
As we moved on to implementation steps - actually setting up the Facebook presence - we started to notice that these goals are in conflict.

To communicate with parents, we want to give information. Tell the dates and times of field trips, share detailed curriculum information, give parents activities to try at home. I recommended a group for this. Why? We can make it private, so that only parents can see when the children's field trips will be. Most of the information we will give here is too detailed for non students to care about, not to mention privacy issues regarding giving the location of a class at any given time. Plus, with a group, we can send messages directly to parents' in-boxes.

To recruit, we want to showcase the school. Tell about the great things children are learning, the music they sing each day, the fabulous field trips. We also want to highlight the times for open registration before each session. I recommended a page for this. Why? It's public. Anyone can join and find it in search results. It has a viral effect, since friends of a person who "likes*" the page will be able to see the interactions of that person with the page in their Home Newsfeed. This sparks interest. A page also allows us to measure how people are engaging with our page.

In short, any specific information we want to tell parents, we don't want to open up for public viewing, but if we close the group, no potential parents will be able to see the great things the preschool is involved in.

We realized there was no way to achieve both goals using just a page or a group.

Page and Group
After weighing the pros and cons of focusing on one goal or the other, Pam decided to do both. The information on the two sites will be similar, but timed differently.

Group
We set up a group with membership at the "secret" level to protect privacy. This way, Pam can invite parents and staff to the group, but no one without an invitation will even know the group exists. We also set up a policy about who was allowed to be a member of the group, and added procedures to take people out of the group when they leave the school.

Things Pam can post to the group:

• Upcoming field trip information
• School closings
• Curriculum updates
• School events
• Pictures and videos
• New session registration information

Page
We set up a page to post public information. After the group gets the requisite 25 members, Pam can customize the page URL to post on school communications and the school website.

Things Pam can post to the page:

• Past field trip highlights
• Curriculum highlights
• Past school event highlights
• Pictures that contain no children (such as field trip locations and school facilities)
• New session registration information

Pam committed to spending 10-15 minutes each day updating the sites. Since the information she will be posting is already being created (in the form of flyers home to parents), she will not need to spend additional time coming up with items to post. Posting to Facebook is just an additional small step in an established process. She can put the information on the group, then dilute it for use on the page.

This is a great example of taking something that already exists (parent communications) and re-purposing it for easy online use. Looking for a good preschool? I recommend Mountview! :)

*Note that Facebook has recently changed the terminology on us here. It used to be "fan" a page.

A quick look at my class schedule for this quarter as an Ohio State University senior is enough to confuse anyone:

• Corporate Finance
• Graphical World Urbanization
• Product Design
• Geo Physics

How on earth are these courses related? It’s a good question. When people ask me what I did this summer, it adds even more confusion to the puzzle. I don’t know much about computers, I don’t know the tech community in Columbus, and I sure wasn’t a proponent of Twitter. I was the first intern in ShinyDoor’s history. I would need pages upon pages to communicate a complete list of my experiences. What follows is a highlight reel of projects, challenges, successes, failures, lessons learned and events that stick out in my mind.

I met Angela Siefer, owner of ShinyDoor, in May 2009. I had been told she might know of some possible jobs and internships around town through her huge network. Little did I know this first meeting was an interview. I walked out having agreed to intern for Angela’s company. She won’t admit it, but she’s very persuasive.

At the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference, I talked to K-12 administrators, teachers and technology coordinators.  I heard a mix of thoughts regarding social media in the classroom.    Some were saying:

"If we allow social media in K-12 schools then we are opening ourselves up to liability issues."

"Its not safe for our kids to use social media."

And others were saying:

"If we do not teach our kids how to use social networking appropriately, how will they learn?"

"We need to engage kids with the tools they are most comfortable using."

Allen Shaffer of  Bricker & Eckler LLP assists K-12 school districts with social media issues.  Below is a podcast of Allen describing how schools can safely use social media.  Allen maintains (as do I) that as social media becomes more and more ingrained in our culture, schools must take on the responsibility of teaching our youth how to use social media responsibly.