Twitter and Facebook for the School Library

A district administrator just commented the other day about how she didn’t understand why parents would rather go to Facebook to find out information about the schools/district than just going to the website.  Facebook has become a part a life.  It’s where we go to not only socialize with friends and colleagues, but for the latest news and happenings. A lot of people spend a good portion of their day browsing and interacting with others on Facebook.

I began my search for school library pages on Facebook by focusing on elementary schools since that is where I work.  After browsing several pages, I saw that a majority of the posts were about book fairs and summer reading programs. Links to local news stories about the schools and districts, and author and popular character sites were often provided as well.  In all honesty, most of the posts had very few likes, and almost no comments. Two exceptions were Larson Elementary School Library in Alaska who posted about events taking place in the library and shared a couple posts from the public library, and Pocola Elementary in Oklahoma who posted quite a bit about AR successes.  Each of these schools seemed to have quite a bit more patron engagement than others.

I decided to view some high school pages next, since I assumed those students might be more involved in social media and therefore more active on their school’s library page.  Here libraries shared lists from Goodreads such as “Your Favorite Villain,” and asked questions of their followers such as “What are you reading?” Still there were little responses, if any.

After checking out both the higher and lower grades, I went ahead and took a chance looking at some middle school library pages.  I was not all that surprised to find that the post from these schools had the same low numbers.  However, one thing that really stood out to me was that there were a lot more likes and comments on posts when there were actual pictures of the students included.  That’s what gets their attention and that is what they want to see…pictures of themselves and their friends; parents want to see their children and others they know.  Perhaps students or parents even make the effort to seek out those posts if they know they will be included.  This also leads to a greater chance of the posts being shared.

What I found in my searches is that just because we reach out to our students in their “native digital language,” this doesn’t necessarily mean they want to connect with us.  It just seems that most of our students and parents are not all that excited about following and interacting with the school library on Facebook, even if they’re spending large amounts of time there already.

Just from my limited 6 month interactions with Twitter, I must say it is an extremely valuable tool with regards to networking, learning new information, and keeping up with current trends.  I follow many authors, publishers, literary organizations and technology specialist.  This keeps me “in the know” and at the forefront of literary, technological and educational happenings.  Jim Lerman (@jimlerman) shares many links to his Scoop.it! page, and I particularly liked the one from September 3, Otter & Sqworl - Two Helpful Tools for Teachers.  Otter is a service that allows teachers to create simple webpages for distributing information and collecting assignments.  Sqworl is a bookmarking tool that helps both teachers and students organize and share bookmarked pages.  The best part is that both of these sites are free.  Kathy Schrock (@kathyschrock) is an educational technologist who shares great information about using technology in schools, including a September 3 link to her great blog post on Using Pokemon Go In the Classroom which is really popular right now.  What a great way to capture the students’ attention!  I also found her July 26 tweet Best Education Blogs to Follow a wonderful resource for educators.  One more post that I found that I will definitely be sharing with my teachers was from Gwyneth Jones on September 4, 60 STEAM Apps for the Classroom.  It consisted of applications for all grade levels in the areas of science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics

Right now, our school library’s web presence consists of a page on our school’s website and the blog I created for our students and staff that is linked on the webpage.  I do tweet out my blog posts on my personal Twitter page as well.  Sadly, we are not allowed to create FB pages and Twitter accounts for our library.  They are very particular about what gets posted, and from whom, in the district in which I work.  We may submit photos, stories and ideas to our communications director and he chooses whether or not to post it.  However, my principal is petitioning for us to be allowed to at least be able to create an account for our school and if approved I plan to include as much information about our library’s goings on as possible!