Connecting with Our School Communities

Principal-in-Residence, Lisa Nagamine, is working on improving communication between principals, primarily those at the elementary level within the Hawaii Department of Education. She decided to try blogging out information and asked me for suggestions. I admire Lisa; this is a worthy goal but a pretty tough task to get busy principals to buy into reading a blog. As a school that uses blogs to communicate (staff bulletin and weekly DKIES Highlights published by our parent-community coordinator), I made a few suggestions. One of them was to get other principals to share an idea via her blog. Since I made the suggestion, I'll be the first t contribute to the Elementary Principals Forum News and Announcements. 

A few years ago, our SCC asked for feedback from our parents, and one of the suggestions was to improve communication with the school community. At the time, many of our parents were deployed so we decided to use social media to share what we were doing at our school. Today, we have an active Facebook page, a Twitter feed. and use Remind.com in addition to our blogs. We even have virtual School Community meetings twice a year with much better participation than we had with face-to-face meetings.

What social media tool is best for the "beginner?" I started with Twitter and later linked our Facebook posts to my principal account so now, when I post on FB, it automatically tweets to my followers. Now we have more opportunities to share what's happening at our school! One of my favorite bloggers and author of The Innovator's Mindset is George Couros. He presented at the 2016 Leadership Symposium and at the New Principal Academy. I noticed that after those sessions, many more of our principals started Twitter accounts for themselves or their schools. It's been fun to see what's happening at the schools and to learn from others. The great thing about Twitter is with a maximum of 140 characters, the message needs to be simple but effective. Here are a few tweets from this past week:

• Jennifer Sueoka, principal of Ha`aheo Elementary
• Kaipo Simpson, principal of Pearl Harbor Elementary
• James Kau, principal of Aiea Elementary
• Kaimiloa Elementary
• Aina Haina Elementary School 
• Webling Elementary School
• Waiahole Elementary School
• Waiakeawaena Elementary School
• Iliahi Elementary School

Let's not forget our Hawaii Department of Education and Superintendent Kishimoto! Follow them and they'll follow you!

As you can see from the tweets, there's a lot of opportunity to be creative or to use photos to tell our stories. Twitter is not only a way to share about our school. It's also a great way to get professional development, but that is a whole other blog that maybe someone else will write for this Elementary Principals Forum and News Announcements. 

I'd like to end this blog by sharing a slide show we created in 2016 to share about how our school uses technology to connect with our school community. I'm sure other principals have ideas to share. Let's use this Elementary Principals blog to connect with others in our Department and share our successes!