Memorial Day Tidings

I hope this message finds you and yours healthy and happy on this Memorial Day Weekend!

Your Friends Steve & Beneta Nelson

25 Wild Ideas For Your School District

Seth Godin’s Alternative MBA students were asked to come up with a list of business ideas. Each student (there are 9 of them) came up with 111 ideas and posted the ideas for free on their blog. The point of this was to show that, as they put it, “Ideas are a dime a dozen. The money is in the execution.”

It’s an important lesson… and especially important to our mission here at SocialMediaSchools.com. What this means for our schools is that nothing is going to change until some of our schools step up and act on the ideas we are discussing here on the site. Our schools need to build up some courage, sign up for these various social media websites, and start interacting with their communities online.

Of course, some schools will receive criticizm for their online actions… and others will have great success. But we won’t learn a thing until we start to act!

Now, the 999 ideas these students came up with don’t all have to do with education and schools, but many of them do.

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Should Your School Be Using Social Media?

When I was in elementary school the teacher would pass out flyers, which we students were then supposed to take home to our parents and share with them. These flyers contained information on school events, fundraisers and important community happenings.

But the days of paper flyers are over!

They’re over because of 1) an increased awareness of paper waste and environmental issues… and 2) because technology, the Internet, cell phones and social media has changed the way we communicate and share information.

In this article, I’d like to take a look at the issue of communication and propose a new way of looking at the Internet and social media as a means of keeping parents, teachers, students, and community members informed about what is actually happening in our local schools. But more than anything else, I’d like to look at these new technological advacements as a powerful tool for collaboration and what could soon become the greatest educational instrument ever created.
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