Students Use Social Media to Promote Schools
Student at East High use Twitter to share school news and build Scarlet spirit.
The East High School journalism class is meeting to brainstorm ideas to fill their newspaper, The Scroll. Though advisor Natalie Niemeyer will admit that the idea of printing the news is outdated. Social media is the newer, faster way to get and deliver news. So Niemeyer suspends the school’s no-cell-phone policy during class.
“I think it’s important in journalism that they are able to use them, because social media is the future of journalism,” Niemeyer said.
With more than a billion people worldwide using Facebook to share news and information, both large and small, social media sites are anything but a trend. And throughout Des Moines Public Schools, thousands of students, teachers, parents and alumni are part of the effort.
East High School dove headfirst into social media last year, when Lane Galvin started the @_TheTribe Twitter account to bring students together to support the girls’ basketball team.
“I wanted to make our student section look so good and make our school look great,” Galvin said. “So let’s get the word out about what we’re going to do.”
Niemeyer said she’s proud of the students who are trying to improve their school experience.
“They Tweet to get people pumped up,” she said. “To tell them what to wear to games, what time to be there, how much tickets are and they do a lot of positive shout-outs, which I think is cool, because a lot of people think high school students are kind of judgmental, and they hear about bullying. But I just think there are a lot of positive things going on in high schools, and I think the Tribe is a really accurate picture of that.”
Once the sporting events begin, students like Kendrew Panyanouvong live Tweet news updates via East’s student newspaper Twitter account, @EastScroll.
“I just try my best to keep everybody updated because there are alumni and parents who can’t make it to see the game, but they do watch our Twitter feed,” Panyanouvong said.
The popularity of the student-run social media sites has grown with alumni and students.
“It just spread like wildfire, just everyone started following,” Galvin said.
Slightly more than 400 people now follow @_TheTribe. @EastScroll has about 680 followers.
The students want more. Not just more social media attention, but more people attending events and taking pride in their school.
“For example, our neighbor school, North, they excelled this year with their student section,” Panyanouvong said. “This year was like their first year having a school section. You can really see their gain throughout the community, and the alumni were starting to come.”
At North, the social media movement started slower but has rapidly picked up speed, according to journalism instructor Ben Graeber.
“The thing I was cautious about at first was handing out a free pass for the students to Tweet out whatever they wanted,” he said. “So they just filtered things through me.”
Graeber said today, several seniors have the password. Not just to Twitter. But to the school’s Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube and Facebook accounts.
Social media are now part of the curriculum. Journalism class now includes Twitter technique. Student social media director Michael Pham said tweeting accelerates afterhours as students carry their mobile devices to school events.
“During the basketball season I tweeted about 17 to 20 games, live tweeting, so I was in the stands tweeting scores, whatnot, we connected with a lot of people,” he said. “We actually connected with people all though the Midwest and Florida.”
More than 600 people follow @NorthHighOracle. Seven hundred follow @NHSPolarBears.
“We had a great boys’ basketball team, so if we were not tweeting by 7:45 p.m. we would get, ‘Hey, when are you guys going to start, what happened to the game, are you not there today?’” Graeber said.
North has also branched out into Tumblr – a blogging site. Student Rachel Nash said she’s thrilled to see the response to her posts.
“Our posts are getting notes and likes and re-blogs so that they’re also getting out there,” she said. “So that means that people are looking at our stuff and actually paying attention to us.”
Her co-blogger, Iliana Castillo, said it’s all for the good of the school.
“I think we are having a positive impact,” she said.
Now that Chanbopha Sam has joined the journalism team, they’re on YouTube, too.
“The videos range like serious to like something funny,” Sam said. “Most of my videos are something funny because I’m a goofy person and I like to mess around, but I can get serious if I want to.”
Bopaw, as she’s called by her classmates, edited together a Harlem Shake video that students talked about for weeks.
“It’s like you’ve created something that people are actually interested in and it’s just, it’s nice,” Bopaw said.
Links to her videos are Tweeted out, blogged about on Tumblr or posted to Facebook. One in three North High students now follow the journalism team. The journalism students try to be at every school activity they can with the hope that fellow students will follow them online and eventually attend the event themselves.
“With 60 students in newspaper and yearbook, we can be at about every event,” Graeber said. “If we have kids with their iPads capturing at least a photo from an event, we can at least show people what they’re missing, and that leads people to participate more.”
Des Moines Public Schools high schools have made big gains in Twitter followers over the past few years.
Lincoln High School’s @LHSrails Twitter account is the most popular single account, with more than 1,000 followers. And an outgoing senior created an @ComplimentsLHS_ feed to give students a boost. Its followers are growing in number, too.
Twitter’s @HooverHuskies weighs in with a little more than 500 followers.
And Roosevelt High School has nearly a dozen accounts, dividing the twitter feeds by interest.
Students said they feel a responsibility to be involved in social media, not just for their own education, but for the success of their school and fellow students.
“I feel like nowadays that schools need the support from kids at almost everything,” Panyanouvong said. “Kids basically run their high school so I feel like it’s essential for kids to just be involved in general. High school is one of the best times of your life. Getting involved is really important. It’s fun. It’s not lame.”
Another plus? Their effort receives almost instant positive feedback.
“I love watching how many retweets we get. ‘Cause like my phone will start vibrating, vibrating, vibrating and I just think that’s so fun to watch it go off because then I know our school is getting the word out and it’s going to happen,” Galvin said.
In addition to the individual school sites, you can follow Des Moines Public Schools online. Find us @DMschools on Twitter. Look for us on Facebook under DMSchools. See photos at on our Flickr account. And find us on Instagram at desmoinespublicschools.
