Reading the headline, many will have wondered what connection schools have with social media topics. Basically, the thought opens up quickly, after all, it is the goal of the teachers to understand the life worlds of their students. Often enough, they finally get questions about it in class. And isn’t it part of the current educational competence to teach the young generation how to deal adequately with these media? It is also becoming increasingly important for schools to expand their communication to social media channels with the help of the cheapest SMM panel. As part of further training to become a “Social Media School Guide” in cooperation with the IHK Mittleres Ruhrgebiet, we have trained the first multipliers at the Berufskolleg Hattingen.

Social media situation in schools is heterogeneous

The situation in schools today is characterized by a divided situation: while most students spend a large part of their time on social media channels, teachers have very different approaches to it. Of course, this cannot be based on age, but a trend is still foreseeable: the younger teacher often has social media experience, and with the older generations of teachers, access to the social media world is quite heterogeneous. Some participate very well, others refuse these media and cannot understand the enthusiasm of their students for it. Now, however, the question arises as to how to build and expand social media skills among teachers. One possibility, for example, is to continue your education. The Berufskolleg Hattingen has taken this path and learned about the Business Academy Ruhr through its good contact with IHK Mittleres Ruhrgebiet. Together, we have developed and carried out a training course specially tailored to schools.

Description of the further training for the “Social Media School Guide (IHK)”

The aim of this training was to enable teachers to understand entrepreneurial social media communication. This makes it possible to implement these adequately for the school itself, but also to pass on the knowledge to the students. Because they are often alone in everyday school life with their questions about how they should use the social media channels of their training companies. Now it is possible for the teachers trained in the Social Media School Guide to integrate social media questions from the corporate context into their lessons and respond to questions. They know about the legal framework of social media practice in companies, know the differences and challenges of the large networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Xing, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, but also the cornerstones of a social media strategy. In just under seven weeks, they worked on these topics both online and in face-to-face phases. The following contents were part of the training:

These topics were implemented in three face-to-face sessions and three supplementary online modules. In addition to the high workload at the end of the school year, this was a challenge that had to be mastered. It quickly became clear that implementing social media for companies is much more than being on the channels privately.

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Experience

As a central experience, the ten participants of the training course uniformly took with them that numerous aspects of entrepreneurial social media work were not clear to them. Although you can see that some companies implement social media channels in a very high-quality way, as a layman you do not know what is necessary for this. Above all, the targeted strategic approach aligned with goals and target groups, the planned design, and the use of a wide variety of social media tools ultimately make a difference in private use.

Result

Even if not all teachers were social media fans before the training, they caught fire during the training and were able to understand why this topic is so exciting for companies. They have developed ideas on how to integrate social media topics more strongly into the classroom in the future and how they can design the implementation of social media channels for their own school. As a team of the Business Academy Ruhr, we had a lot of fun looking after this motivated group and are sure that with this further education we have initiated an important step to accompany schools on their way into the digital world of their student body.

If you as a school or educational institution are also interested in social media topics, please feel free to contact us. We are happy to develop tailor-made training for you or accompany you – a bit – on your way into the social media world.