Behind the LewisCentralCSD Social Media Curtain

This week, I helped launch my new school district into the social media world. The key, for me, was automation. If you've ever scrolled through this blog, you know that means IFTTT. 
We set up a Facebook Page, Instagram account and Twitter account for Lewis Central. We created a generic email address within our domain that was used to create all of the accounts. There were many ideas for what the username for the social media accounts would be. Ideally, you want them to be the same so people can look for the same thing across all platforms. @LewisCentral was already taken on Twitter. Another thought was LCCSD (Lewis Central Community School District), which would be nice and short for Twitter, but already taken on Instagram. So my attention turned to LewisCentralCSD. While it's a little longer than the "preferred" Twitter username, other users will just have to be creative to get their mentions under 140 characters!
The header images for Facebook and Twitter, as well as the profile picture for all three accounts, were created with Canva. I grabbed a picture I had and one from a teacher librarian to make the header images. I tried to match the district website header text with the text in the Canva images.
On to the automation - after one day, I've already had to do some tweaking. Anytime a picture is posted to Instagram, it gets posted to Twitter and Facebook. But I had also set up a recipe that anytime I put a link on Twitter (like to a news article), it would post to our Facebook Page. That was causing duplication in those pictures. So I've instead added a new recipe that anytime I use the hashtag #fb on Twitter, that tweet will be posted to the Facebook page. I've already forgot that tidbit once this morning, but hopefully it will become habit.
Below are the recipes that we are currently using to automate the posting process:

I will be using Tweetdeck in Chrome to do most of the monitoring. I've also used it to schedule a tweet or two every now and then. For instance, I emailed our staff a link to a post on our district website about the new accounts. I wanted to give them a chance to read the article prior to sending it out via Twitter and Facebook, so I scheduled a tweet to go out after school gets out. That way I won't forget AND I get to begin my weekend on time!
In 36 hours, we have 87 "likes" on Facebook and 46 followers on Twitter. Instagram only has 14 followers, which I'm less concerned with because I'm thinking of it more as a tool to provide content for the other two sites. Honestly, I'm not concerned with numbers anyway. That will come with time. It's exciting to have the district in the social media/networking world and I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves in the future.

You're just a guest

Last night, we had Jimmy Casas, principal of Bettendorf High School, as a guest on Dads in Ed. He was great, and I encourage you to check out the whole video recording or listen to the podcast (click here for iTunes). 
One thing he said really stuck with me as I tried to get to sleep after such a great discussion. While taking about being an administrator at Bettendorf High:

"The reality is that I recognize I'm just a guest in that community. You know, our time as leaders in different organizations will come and go, but we have a responsibility while we're there to continue to make sure that we do everything we can to maintain a sense of community and to bring that passion and to bring our best everyday to an organization. That's honestly our responsibility to make sure we are doing that, especially for our kids and to model that for our community." 

Click here to skip to that part of the show.

I hadn't ever thought of it like that, but it's so true. Think about the elementary school that you went to, or even the high school. Are you proud to say that you went there? Do you still associate yourself with it? How many of your teachers are still there? The building itself is still the life blood of the community, even though a number of those teachers are no longer there. I'd be willing to say that most, if not all, of my elementary teachers are no longer teaching at the school I attended. In my first five years of teaching, I had two different principals. In 12 years at my previous district, I went through three superintendents. Your school will still be there long after you move on, but will you make it better while entrusted in your care?

Using IFTTT to Get Your Picture-a-Day Dominoes to Fall in Order

Photo by marfis75

Since 2009, I've been doing a "picture a day" blog for our family. It's gone through many iterations - first iWeb, then Posterous. After those two went by the wayside, I moved to Blogger (where it should've been at first...but that's another blog post). The blog started out just being shared with parents and grandparents via email. Then I began sharing them on social media and wanted an easier way to back up the pictures and text. That's a lot of different places to post. Thanks to If This, Then That (IFTTT), I can now post to one spot and all of that happens automatically. Like knocking over one domino and watching the rest fall down!

Thanks to two IFTTT recpies, when I post to Blogger, the post automatically goes to both Facebook and a copy is sent to Flickr for the picture backup (see below). One post to three places. As I've began using Instagram more, I set up an IFTTT recipe to autopost to Flickr if I used the hashtag #mykids. I typically set up similar ones for special events (#snowdays, #ressesturns1, etc.). 

What I began to realize is that sometimes I would have the same picture in Flickr twice: once from the #mykids recipe and once from the blog post. That doesn't always happen, but sometimes I make a #mykids post on Instagram in the morning and then decide to use that picture later in the day. It's not a huge deal because Flickr gives you a terabyte of storage for free (that's a lot), but if I ever get around to organizing my pictures it could be annoying. So the other day I set up a new recipe that if I tagged a picture in Instagram picture with #blog, it automatically creates a new post on my picture a day blog. That starts the dominoes falling!

I won't always start my blog post from Instagram, but it's now possible and I won't end up with two pictures in Flickr.
There are thousands of ways to use IFTTT. If doing a picture a day blog for your family or class, you wouldn't have to use as many recipes as I did. Or you could substitute other recipes. IFTTT would be a great way to get share with parents more of what is going on in your classroom. Setting up recipes to work together gets all of your dominoes to fall the same direction.
Click here for my IFTTT presentation at #neta14.

Don't Model Social Media Use

In May, Sean Junkins wrote a blog post that said, very eloquently, we should stop telling students to change the world. He provided multiple examples of teenagers who changed the world negatively. Instead, according to Sean, society should challenge them to harness their sense of purpose to make a positive contribution to the world.
The same could be said for social media. As educators, we need to be models for our students of how to use social media. We've long had non-educator examples of how not to use social media (the former backup OSU quarterback Cardale Jones is one I use frequently). Last night, I was provided with two examples from current Nebraska administrators along those same lines.

As the high school football season descended upon Nebraska Friday, I went to watch my cousin's son play. Via Twitter, I was also keeping up with a game of HUGE importance in my district, the cross town battle between our two high schools. I was using our district's sports Twitter account to retweet scores from people at the game when I came across these two subsequent tweets from an account that very clearly identifies the person as an athletic director at a local high school.

Just to be clear, the bottom one came first. The account had been tweeting when each team scored.

Is that administrator using social media? Absolutely. And by scrolling back through the account and looking at it again today, the account does a great job of sharing their school's scores. But is that account modeling appropriate use of social media? In my opinion, absolutely not. 

I considered mentioning the account in a tweet from my personal account (we don't follow each other, so I couldn't direct message them), but instead sent out a couple generic tweets and added the #nebpreps hashtag, one used by high school athletic departments across the state.

Grateful for a #nebpreps metro-area AD for providing me another example of how NOT to model social media use to their students.
— Josh Allen (@j_allen) August 31, 2013

Cheer for your team. Model respect for your opponent. Don't rub it in that you're blowing them out. #nebpreps
— Josh Allen (@j_allen) August 31, 2013

After my tweets, a good friend replied back that it was a superintendent, not athletic director. However, after a few direct messages, we found that we were talking about two different people. Below is the other tweet.

As administrators, you are expected to cheer and support with all of your might for your school. Be biased. I frequently am on our district's sports account. But you need to be - all of us need to be - models of appropriate use of social media. Tweeting at the expense of your opponent, in my opinion, isn't appropriate use of social media. Am I perfect? No. But go back through my Twitter feed and find a time when I put down a kid who was trying their hardest. Those teenagers on the opposing teams have worked all summer for their time under the Friday night lights and you thumbed your nose at them. What would happen if that was one of your student? One of your staff? Judging from what you posted, probably nothing.
We apparently need to stop asking educators to model social media and instead be more directed as to the type of modeling we need to do. I don't feel this type of behavior is wide spread among administrators, but I also don't feel it's OK to just "let it go." I plan on contacting people I know in both districts. I don't know either person whose name is on those Twitter accounts, nor do I expect them to know me. I'm not the Twitter police, but I've put myself out there as a Twitter ambassador for our great state and I don't like when others cast a negative light on all the great things educators are doing here. In the grand scheme of things, this is much more tame than many things that kids say to each other online during a day. I get that. But we educate kids and should hold ourselves to higher expectations then we hold them to. I don't know what the administrators' response will be. I won't be upset if there never is a response. I don't need one directed at me. But it probably wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if they responded to the opposing teams. What I do know is that we, as educators, need to not just model social media, but model positive use of social media.

On a good note...this EXTREMELY positive use of social media is making the rounds for what a group of Nebraska high school kids did at a football game last night. Kudos to my good friend Jay Dostal for sharing his students' idea.

The ultimate act of sportsmanship. Helping a Pius player in need. Way to go #KHSBearcatNation pic.twitter.com/SBVtP6O8jx
— Jay Dostal, Ed.D. (@jaydostal) August 31, 2013