Social Media in the Library

 Facebook Exploration- On Facebook, I found that searching “school library” and “school library pages” generated quite a few school library pages to look through. One of the first libraries I came across was the Raba Elementary Library here in San Antonio. The first thing I noticed is that there isn’t much engagement. There are a few reactions and maybe 1 share on some posts. The librarian at this library reposts a lot of posts from a nonprofit organization called Read Aloud. I like when she adds her own view and opinion to the top of these reposts. There are also some reposts from the SA public libraries, the district, and Scholastic along with other educational organizations. It’s actually rare to find an original post. I think that the information shared is important and interesting. It’s meant to motivate students and parents to read more, but I think it’s clearly aiming to reach parents. One frustrating aspect of the search was that a lot of library posts were from the school’s Facebook pages and not from a library page. The next library page I looked through was a High school library. Taft High School Library had a nice mix of original posts focusing on the events in the library, important dates, the patrons, and important community events. There were also book recommendations that were focused on different times of the year, like Black History Month and Hispanic Heritage Month. Once again, participation on these posts is limited. There are usually fewer than 5 comments, reactions, or shares. The next library I’ll be mentioning is a Middle School Library. On the Kirby Middle School Library page, the focus is on informing students and parents of the activities and events going on in the library. Most of the posts are original and focus a lot on the students and their accomplishments and products. The librarian really engages her students, and I see more engagement in the reactions and comments. It’s not a lot, but more than the previous. The advantages have to be the ease of use and the amount of people (especially parents) that could potentially see it. The familiarity of it and the ease of sharing videos and accomplishments makes it a great tool. I also really like that students could potentially respond with pictures. Now the disadvantages are that there isn’t a lot of response. It could be that students just aren’t using Facebook anymore. That is what one student at a middle school informed me of last year, and the other students giggled in consensus. It could be that posts from the library just don’t interest them enough to engage in them. Whatever the reason, I could imagine it being frustrating to put so much effort into reaching out and not seeing much response.

Twitter Exploration- There are so many different types of professionals on Twitter that are commenting on different aspects of education. I saw a lot of advocacy for different groups. I also saw some book reviews and technology recommendations. Linda Braun even had posts about professional development that she created and presented. She was also a big fan of retweeting the Collected Learning Alliance and the School Library Journal.

https://twitter.com/TheCLAlliance/status/1377279552817397761?s=20

The Daring Librarian also tweets personal interests like shows and media figures. Book bans, rewritings, and quotes were also a big part of what she tweets. https://twitter.com/GwynethJones/status/1632367040882196481?s=20

Jim Lerman likes to focus on technology and has a lot of links to explore what he’s showcasing. The website before the actual information is confusing and I definitely wouldn’t do that to parents. I’m not even sure they would bother clicking on to the next part, either because of confusion or a loss of interest. If I were to use it with parents I would try to be explicit about teaching it, but I’m not sure the website is worth the trouble.

 https://twitter.com/jimlerman/status/1632190047444140032?s=20

The School Library Journal focused on books and information that was important to librarians like surveys and legislation. https://twitter.com/sljournal/status/1632901434839556098?s=20

The advantages of Twitter are that it is still a relevant platform that a lot of people (parents and students) are interested in. Information is easy to find and share. The disadvantages are that some older parents may not be on Twitter. It can be hard to sift through information when certain accounts make a lot of posts.

Instagram Exploration- Instagram can be used in so many different ways! I have seen librarians use it (or other types of social media that would lend itself easily to this platform) for advertising different sections of the library, inviting students to events, and encouraging interaction with fun videos like how many books it takes to crush a can for crush a can day. I think that even using it for assignments would be really fun and interactive. I chose to allow students to pick a book they read throughout the week and share important details related to comprehension like: What happened at the beginning, middle, and end of the book? What was the problem and solution? Who were the main characters? The great thing about it is that these questions are built upon in the TEKS for students (at least in elementary school) so they could be used (with slight modifications) for multiple grade levels. I would even encourage interaction in the form of finding and sharing books they enjoyed, recreating settings or characters in books and posting, or even encouraging students to ask questions or provide comments throughout the process of reading using a post. Here is what I did:

Reel: Story Elements

Instagram Post

Some advantages of using Instagram are its popularity, the simplicity of the format, and the ease of seeing all the posts that have been made or the times the library has been tagged. It's also really easy to see what students have been working on. When you follow your students their posts and stories will just show up on your feed. The disadvantages are part of the popularity. There are so many different people or organizations that are on Instagram, it may be difficult for parents (especially of younger children) to want their children to be a part of it. This would require advocacy and maybe even the creation of an account for school use.