An unexpected move for me in 2022 was joining Facebook.
Students, family, and friends began joining Facebook in about 2005. At the time, I was a high school teacher. After watching some friends and colleagues get into dicey situations with information they posted that was, shall we say “judged”, by students, their families, and/or community members, I knew that Facebook was a complication that I did not want to add to my life. Additionally, I did not have close family or friends that were relying on Facebook for communication at the time so the decision was an easy one.
Over the almost 20 years since I initially decided to NOT join Facebook, the site has ebbed and flowed in popularity and audience, among other things. Most of the time, the decision to not join Facebook was easy to renew, even once it was no longer a place that current students frequented and the “students issue” no longer a valid reason.
It’s not that I’m against social media. I joined Twitter in 2011, albeit skeptically at first (“Why would I care what Justin Bieber had for breakfast?”) I can’t even imagine how much less fulfilling my teaching career would be if I did not have the incredible educational PLN (Personal Learning Network) that I have met and maintained over Twitter. From 2014-2018 when I taught an #edtech course for pre-service teachers, I encouraged them to join and create a Twitter PLN, even though a student once lamented that “Twitter was so 2013.” At that time, Twitter was already a highly valuable tool for the education community but Facebook had not yet become a dominant place for educators to meet and learn together.
But, in the last few years, the use of Facebook as a place where educators meet and learn has indeed evolved. During the first decade of Facebook, I had never regretted not having a Facebook account. However, in the past two years or so, I have, on many occasions, toyed with the idea of hopping into the Facebook world as more and more of the learning circles that I’m connected to are using Facebook as their main place of community connection instead of other tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams or Discord that they may have previously used for a while. Without a Facebook account, I was increasingly missing out on some important Education PLN communities … missing out on product sneak peaks, community announcements and other opportunities. In fact, I had even started to keep a list of Facebook groups that I needed to join should I ever create a Facebook account.
And then, in my District Instructional Coach role, we have recently been encouraged to post more of the “learning” that we are seeing in classrooms and schools. The idea is that we can help to model for school admin and teachers how to post in a way that really frames and highlights the learning, instead of just the sports team reports and concerts, assemblies, etc that many schools traditionally post. After posting lots to Instagram for a few weeks, I knew that this was largely a waste of time as fewer schools and parents had Instagram accounts and as Instagram doesn’t “repost” as easily, it was a small audience if our district account didn’t repost our material to their story.
So, put all of those factors together and this “holdout” is now learning to use Facebook! My account is strictly school and education related. In some ways Facebook is pretty easy to figure out if you’ve used other social media, so I think I’m successfully posting at a basic level. There are lots of things I don’t like about Facebook – some might be just things I haven’t figured out how to do well yet, but other things like the obvious algorithms do drive me crazy.
As I post content from my frequent visits to schools around our district and use Facebook to promote our #PrairieRosePossibilities podcast, there definitely is a bigger audience that I can connect to through schools (especially if schools repost when I shout out the good things that are happening in their classrooms). For example, it has been interesting to hear real life comments from people who enjoyed a series of posts that I did about “The making of Elf the Musical”. This was one of the first things I did on Facebook so posting there already feels like less of a “waste of time” for this audience than just posting to Instagram or Twitter (where there is almost no parent audience but a broader educator audience).
At the end of the day, it’s still good to try “new” things.