School libraries use their pages to communicate with their school families. They use it to promote initiatives in their libraries by posting announcements and pictures, invites, and details of events. Using Facebook could be a great way for a school to stay connected with patrons and their families. An advantage to using Facebook is that many people are familiar with the format and how to use it. It is also easy to maintain. You can post text and photos that followers can react to and comment on. It allows for community involvement. Communication back and forth is quick and easy. The disadvantages that I see are its fading popularity and there was a lack of participation on the sites that I visited. There were few likes and even fewer comments. It hardly seems worth the effort to update the site if people aren’t going to be there to see the exciting things going on. This is a social media platform that is mostly used by people my age and older (40 +). Due to this fact, I don’t think it would be worthwhile to set up a page. Most of the parents at my school are younger than I am by several years. Facebook would be a good way to reach their grandparents, though.
The educational technology folks that I followed, post about their interests, of course, but also upcoming events that professionals in related fields would be interested in. For example, a year ago Linda Braun posted about a project she worked on with the University of Maryland.
Others like Kathy Schrock and Jim Lerman often post about educational technology topics relating to the library and students.
Some use their Twitter accounts to mostly tweet about professional topics, while others like the Daring Librarian, also tweet about Netflix and what they are reading for pleasure. My big takeaway is that Twitter seems to be a great way for professionals in the field to share their expertise and experiences with like-minded people and for organizations to keep people updated with the latest news and events. It is user-friendly and one can get easily lost in the scroll, reading through numerous postings. School libraries could easily use this to update patrons and their families about events, make announcements, and promote reading and their libraries. It would be fun to tweet a short summary about a new book arrival or that week’s read-aloud. A disadvantage to Twitter is that you have a limited amount of characters to communicate your message in, but this is outweighed by your ability to tweet in multiple modes. Users can tweet photos, links, videos, or just words. Whatever communicates your message best!
In our increasingly visual world, you can see the appeal of Instagram. Here I posted a picture of our beautiful Ross Elementary Library. You can see the gorgeous blue sky, which is often our backdrop. One idea that I had for librarians, or even teachers, is to record and post a quick bedtime story for parents to play for their kids, in case they don’t have a lot of books at home, or the time to read to their children at night. I think it’s a nice way to share the joy of reading with a wide audience. Other ideas that I have for using Instagram for the school library are to post pictures of new book arrivals, special projects the kids create, and even new displays. Librarians or teachers could create picture announcements on websites like Canva, and then post them on Instagram. Important time-sensitive pictures and videos can be added to Highlights to keep them at the top and easily seen by families. The disadvantage of this platform is that you can’t post text without images.
