How Twitter can help teaching professionals bring their classes to life

1. Stop worrying and start tweeting!
How Twitter will help you bring your teaching to life
Wednesday 1st May 2013
@brainstormdsgn #JedTech uk.linkedin.com/in/brainstormdigital

2. A bit about me…
• Advising schools on how to attract pupils, engage with parents
and make learning fun through use of social media
• I do this through…..
• Training
• Developing a strategy and content
• Setting objectives and KPIs
• Ongoing mentoring, feedback and reporting

3. Key Learnings
• Setting up your Twitter account
• How social media can make learning fun
• How to network and collaborate with other teaching
professionals
• Ensuring you have a social media strategy to help you achieve
your goals
• How to minimise any potential risks from using social media

4. Twitter facts
• Over 500 million users
• Over 340 million updates posted per day.
• Profiles can be both branded and personal
• You can follow and communicate with anyone
(provided they don’t have a protected profile)
• Twitter is one big public conversation!
• Tweets and profiles can be easily searched. Network with other
teaching professionals - join in the conversation!
• Important for reputation management - see what people are
saying about your school!
• Stay safe - you can block and report malicious users

5. Why Twitter?
• 140 character limit ideal for short attention spans
• Is used by a lot of your pupils and its fast interactive nature
makes learning fun
• Is a public conversation, makes it easy for you to keep the
public informed
• By writing engaging tweets, you can share blog posts, images,
and even video
• It’s a great place to brainstorm with other education
professionals for the best ideas
• Above all it’s safe. Twitter enables you to block as well as report
malicious users. Your professional Twitter acccount is separate
from your personal account

6. Twitter profiles can be branded or
personal. You have 160 characters

7. How your school should be using
Twitter
• Your bio must have a USP
• Twitter should be a two way communication not just a news feed
• Follow thought leaders who can enhance your teaching
• Use it to keep parents in the loop
• Showcase the school’s achievements e.g. share photos and
videos
• Share updates that are on your Facebook page
• Share the schools view e.g. blog post from head teacher
• Think of ways to promote user generated content:
• Use it to enhance your teaching through quizzes, discussions,
competitions and even games

8. Steps to setting up a Twitter
account
• Go to www.twitter.com/signup
• Enter your full name, email address, and a password
• Click Sign up for Twitter
• On the next page, you can select a memorable and short
username
• Double-check your name, email address, password, and
username
• Click Create my account.You may be asked to complete a
Captcha to let us know that you're human
• Twitter will send a confirmation email to the address you
entered on sign up, click the link in that email to confirm your
email address and account.

9. Selecting the right username
• Your username is the name your followers use when sending
@replies, mentions, and direct messages. It will also form the
URL of your Twitter profile page. E.g.
www.twitter.com/brainstormdsgn
• You can change your username in your account settings at any
time, as long as the new username is not already in use.
• Usernames should be short and memorable as it will need to be
included in tweets which are only 140 characters

10. Once you’ve set up your account…
• Fill in your bio
• Either use a photo of yourself or a logo
• Write your first tweet
• Don’t follow people before you’ve taken the above steps
• Why follow people?!
- Because what they say is relevant to you
- Because you already have a relationship with them
- Because you’d like to develop a relationship with them
- Some of these people will follow you back

11. Help! How do I write a tweet?
• Ask a question
• Share useful information
• Retweet content that’s relevant to your audience
• Respond to, comment on things other people say
• Include #hashtags, @usernames and hyperlinks where possible
• Mention your other social media channels
• Share rich media from your school
• Share your blog posts
• Share external content such as news or vidoes
• Mention upcoming events
• Repeat all the above (reworded)
• Above all Educate - Inform - Engage

12. For Twitter to work, your updates
need to be engaging

13. Find the people you want to
follow using the “discover” tool or
use the search box

14. To help you come up with great
ideas, create a list of your favourite
twitter users

15. Use keywords, #hashtags and lists
to track relevant discussions

16. Share photos of class activities

17. You can also embed youtube and
vine content

18. Twitter enables you to block or
report malicious and abusive users

19. Steps to report malicious users
• Bookmark this link:
https://support.twitter.com/forms/abusiveuser
• Go to the offensive tweet, click on “expand”, then click on details
• You’ll then have a link to the specific tweet in the URL bar
• Copy this link and then paste into the “abusive tweets” form
where it say “link to tweet”. Fill in the rest of the blanks on the
form and you’re good to go.
• Ensure you mass report as this is more likely to get results

20. If there are mass reports
concerning a particular user, you’re
more likely to get results

21. Do you have a Twitter strategy?
• What is your objective?
• Key message to get across
• Will there be a personal page as well as a school page?
• Who is responsible
• Job description for those implementing the campaign
• Who to target, who to follow and connect with
• How will you attract more followers
• Guidelines on posting - ratio of educational to conversational posts
• Frequency of posting and response times
• Where will you source content from?
• Content plan
• How social will be integrated with other marketing activity
• Social media guidelines for staff

22. Use Hootsuite to schedule tweets
and monitor what people are saying
on Twitter

23. Google Alerts will notify you on all
the relevant stories

24. Do you have a social media policy
for your staff?
• Tone to be used (serious/playful/non-aggressive etc)
• Frequency of posts
• Where to source content from
• How complaints are dealt with and how quickly
• Acceptable contact with pupils and parents
• Infringement of copyright
• Avoiding conflicts of interest
• Rectifying mistakes
• Disclosing confidential information
• Not damaging the reputation of your school
Examples to follow:
• http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html
• http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/social-networking-guidelines

25. Exercise:
Create your Twitter strategy
• What will you say on your Twitter bio?
• What will be the main objective of your Twitter campaign?
• Who will you follow and engage with?
• Who will be taking responsibility for this?
• How will you educate, inform and engage with your audience?

26. Any questions?
• For more info, go to www.brainstormdesignltd.com/blog/
• Social Media for Schools - 1 day course takes place October
www.brainstormdesignltd.com/schools
• Tweet me your questions. Include the hashtag #JEdTech to
follow the discussion
• Contact me at danny@brainstorm-digital.co.uk about an inset
training day