Thoughts on Facebook & Twitter

We've all heard about Facebook and Twitter.  What's the big deal with each?  Are there advantages or disadvantages to having one?




Personally, I'm a Facebook addict, unfortunately...lol.  Most adults that I know have a FB account.  Today many schools and businesses around the world have a Facebook page.  I think it help parents, students, and may other adults to stay connected to the world and its current news and events.  I've seen some teachers set up their own page for their classroom. They utilize this medium of communication with their parents and students.  My thoughts to this....it's a great tool to use and I believe all librarians could benefit from having a FB page.




I explored several school library Facebook pages as part of this assignment and it was definitely a fun, learning and entertaining experience.  I found so many neat ideas that I had a difficult time disconnecting myself from them. Because I'm very comfortable with FB and can navigate it pretty easily, this makes it very addicting at times.  I got to visit some elementary, middle school, and high school pages.  Some neat things I saw in the Noel Elementary Library page were: post about the librarian promoting a community read along.  Each day there would be a trivia question posted for the students to answer and have a chance to win a prize.  What a great way to encourage students to read with families!  There were also posts of photos of their libraries where they had a spotlight about a certain idea/theme/genre, etc.  I did notice though, that this page only had 174 people following them.  Not sure if the librarian is promoting the page well or if it's because the school is small in regards to students. 




As I explored the middle school page from Albany MS, I noticed how this librarian utilized her page to promote students and their favorite books.  She had photos of the students with a caption of them saying why their book was a great reading choice.  I thought that was awesome! Kids love to be "famous" and want people to see their photos.  She also kept this page up to date and promoted the author, Kwame Alexander, who was coming to visit their library.  Such exciting news whenever an author is visiting! 




In the high school page that I visited, there was a difference for sure.  Here I encountered posts with encouraging quotes about life, books with their movie trailer, and most of the posts were connected to other library pages such as Epic Reads and Teen Book Con.  Though, many of the posts did not have comments and, or few likes.  There were hardly any reviews on their page but over 1000 people had visited it.  This was much more than the elementary and middle school pages had.


Overall, having a FB page can have both its advantages and disadvantages.  Its just like everything else in this world.  Good and bad can come out from having any type of social media. One of the greatest advantages would be to have the ability to advocate for your library.  Many, including administrators, teachers, students, and parents would have access to all the neat and exciting things occurring in your library.  It would be a great medium to utilize in uploading pictures of our students being engaged in interactive lessons, share inspiring quotes, promote reading challenges, encourage volunteering opportunities, share informational articles and apps, and many other wonder things.  Also, it would give librarians a method of collaborating with each other around the world and share their great ideas.  On the other hand, keeping up with the page, could be a task in itself.  Some would see it as a hassle and time consuming, especially for those librarians who do not have an aide.  I've seen this personally, and the challenge of managing a library on your own plus all the extra duties/assignments they place upon you, can make it hard to keep up with the FB page.  In addition, supervising the posted comments or questions would take time.  You wouldn't want to ignore some because then this would give a negative look about the page or page manager. 


As far as my library having a FB page, we don't. I spoke to our librarian and she was happy to know that I would attempt to make one for us.  Here is the link,  https://www.facebook.com/Austin-Elementary-School-Library-1824600637752901/?skip_nax_wizard=true
I hope with her collaboration we can keep it up to date. 


And Twitter.....
I'm somewhat with the mindset that Twitter is more for the young adults.  I'm not to savvy on it and I have a lot to learn on how it can help me as a student, parent, teacher, and future librarian.
I must say though......as I navigated through it, I quickly changed my attitude towards it.   I would absolutely recommend this social media for the main reason to follow other school librarians and top tech leaders in education.  Having a Twitter account gave me this wonderful opportunity to follow some interesting people such as Linda Braun (@lbraun2000), Tony Vincent (@tonyvincent), Buffy Hamilton (@buffyhamilton), Gwyneth Jone (@GwynethJone), Jim Lerman (@jimlerman), and Kathy Schrock (@kathyschrock).  I'm definitely recommending these to many of my colleagues, especially to my librarian.  They sure had lots to offer and share.

As I read through some tweets, I found myself clicking away on almost every link these wonderful ed tech leaders had to share.  Jim Lerman, for example, tweeted about two apps that caught my attention.  One of them being Voice Dream Reader.  This is a very highly recommended app which reads out loud using text to speech.  I was intrigued by it because it would be something great that I could expose my parents of dyslexic students that I service.  My students would surely benefit from using an app like this.  The other app that is connected to this one, which Lerman highlighted was, Voice DreamWriter.  This app is like a personal proofreader.  Awesome for my students to use as well.  It helps pick up errors as you write/type and makes it easy to correct mistakes right away. 

Another great tweet scooped by Gwyneth Jone was the article called 25 Awesome apps for teachers, recommended by teachers via the awesome @Edutech20sco.It/6gebr7. It was fun looking at so many of Gwyneth's tweets.  She is such a vibrant and peppy woman.  Her tweets on the FET Conference were very informative.  Nice to see that she was the speaker featured at the conference.  
Twitter is an awesome medium for communication and for gleaning information about what you're doing in the library or what others are doing.  The amount of information tweeted by so many great ed tech leaders can be extremely helpful for a newbie like myself.   It's something I recommend all librarians to use. 


Both Facebook and Twitter are great mediums to utilize overall.  I believe Twitter would have less of a disadvantage because it doesn't obligate you to update it as much as FB would have you do.