It all started with one tweet…
Just one week prior to this tweet, our administrative team decided to start promoting a school hashtag as a way of giving students some voice in the school. There were a few bumps in the road, but we felt that if teachers and student leaders continued to model appropriate use of the hashtag, it would catch on.
Our school cafeteria has three televisions in it that we use to display announcements. During lunch on March 20th, the request for us to broadcast the NCAA basketball tournament on the televisions came across through a tweet. @EastPrincipal, Louis Lee, and I did not have a problem playing the games during lunch, but decided to turn to our newly created hashtag to get more input from the students. That night, Dr. Lee sent out this tweet:
Within 40 minutes, the tweet had been retweeted close to 250 times! The students were coming together, finding the power in a collective voice, and were using social media to communicate with the adults in the building. Once the students met their goal, the tweets that followed were just as exciting.
The next day, as promised, the students were able to watch the NCAA tournament in the cafeteria. The tweets of “thanks for listening” and “our school is amazing” came rolling in throughout the day. The funny thing is, it didn’t take much for our team to make the student body happy. All we had to do was listen. The NCAA tournament day was a turning point for #oewolfpride. The students realized we valued what they had to say and really did want them to help us celebrate and share all of the great things that made Oswego East High School so amazing.