Expert Insights

This school communicator shows the way. Afraid? What would you do if you weren’t? It’s a question Communications Director Kristin Magette poses to educators who ask how come her K-12 school district was an early adopter of Facebook. Social media can be “scary” for institutions, Kristin acknowledged, because it’s mass two-way communication. What if somebody…

It’s not such a tiny group anymore. Susan M. Bearden is driving the trend of more K-12 teachers tapping into the reach of Twitter from a small independent school in central Florida. “I’ve heard a lot of people say it, but I really mean it: Twitter changed my life,” said Susan, director of information technology at…

They’ve got it down pat. As promised, here’s the second half of my school-to-home communications report, with a big plug for an app that teachers I met last week on a Twitter chat all raved about. First, let me tell you about another chat – the old-fashioned kind with voices among people sharing the same space – that…

Is it weird to talk about schools while on vacation? I had joined my sister and her family for their spring break vacation in Key West when I started this blog post about avenues for school-to-home communication. Writing poolside, with a view of the turquoise Atlantic Ocean, the idyllic example of school-to-home communication I was remembering was…

And it begins with a new strategy. You know how stories are shared. Traditional media excels at telling stories of crisis, challenge, and loss. In Michigan, public school entities are hiring a company with a different news gathering paradigm to spread the word that public education – despite economic challenges — is working better than…

You never know what’ll pop up on the radio. Tom Gould was tuned into a local radio newscast on his Monday morning commute to work at Howell Public Schools when he heard a story about an elementary student who was raising lunch money on behalf of a classmate. According to the story, the student was not…