Wright Elementary Teachers Turn to Twitter

Erin Jennings, a kindergarten teacher at Wright Elementary School, uses her phone to tweet photos of her students. Follow Jennings on Twitter @JenningsKinders or follow Wright @Wrightdmps.

While many families are still working on how social media fits into their lives, teachers at one elementary school are hoping Twitter will help facilitate healthy conversations at the dinner table and beyond.

On the first day of school, every Wright Elementary School teacher started Tweeting.

“We were discussing ways to better communicate with parents,” Principal Lindsey Cornwell said. “There are so many great things happening in our classrooms everyday.  Twitter is real-time and can capture so much more than a weekly newsletter. Parents who follow the classroom Twitter feed can get a picture of their child in class while they are on their lunch break.”

Teachers are Tweeting upcoming events, pictures and student quotes during the day. Wright Elementary is an Artful Learning School, so much of the learning is either visual, auditory or kinesthetic.

“It’s so much nicer for parents to look at a picture of students acting out a scene from a book rather than just hearing about it days later,” Cornwell said.

Cornwell said not only have parents been ‘favoriting’ and ‘retweeting’ posts daily, the school has some followers who live in different parts of the globe. For example, Olafur Eliasson, an artist residing in Germany, recently retweeted a photo from his visit with Wright kindergarteners, who were studying the Panoramic Awareness Pavilion he created for the Pappajohn Sculpture Park.

“I hope parents appreciate the more frequent communication,” Cornwell said. “It certainly gives parents many more detailed questions to ask their children at night, instead of just, “How was school today?”

Follow Wright Elementary School on Twitter: @WrightDMPS.