Saturday, October 22, 2016

Guidelines for Setting Up a Facebook Page for Your School


  1. Select: Company, Organization, Institution
  2. Category: Education
  3. Email: Use the NYC DOE email (or other professional email) that you have set up for your school, institution, or program.
  4. Share website (optional)
  5. Upload photo that represents this page
  6. Complete about section
  7. In the admin panel invite at least one other person as an administrator using their professional email.


This is what the set up looks like.



Note: Following this process you will not need to set up a Facebook profile for the page you are administering.



Next you will create the settings for your page. Darlynn Alfalla, School Tech Specialist at Wagner Middle School in Manhattan worked with Staten Island Ed Tech Leader Jackie Patanio to determine these setting suggestions which you can see in the screenshot below.


Setting considerations
Most of the defaults work but there are a few to consider:
  • Favorites: Add to your favorites so it is always easy to access.
  • Visitors Post: Anyone can publish to the Page, since we want teachers and staff posting events and student work. We also want our school community to be able to post to the page. Moderation is therefore turned off.
  • Messages: As our school has other ways to be contacted and the website is linked to the page, this is turned off. We currently use Remind as a way to message parents.
  • Tagging Ability: We leave this as the default: We will allow the school community to celebrate one another by tagging them in photos. No photos will be posted without permission.  
  • Profanity Filter: Since this is a school, we felt it was responsible to set this to strong.
  • Most in Multiple Languages: This is by far my favorite setting. I checked this box as this can be helpful to many of our students and parents. This allows managers of the page to write posts in multiple languages.


Next is your page “About” section.  Here is what Wagner's looks like:




What do you think? Is what you have selected for your page the same? Different? Please share your choices, successes, and/or challenges in the comments.  

2 comments:

  1. How do you keep students from viewing youir personal profile to keep school and personal pages separated?

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  2. Creating a social media account is a great tool that can be used to incorporate positive communication within the school community. I love the setting "Post in Multiple Languages" as it really plays a large part in my school community. My district as a high ELL population and I truly believe the families at our school would really benefit from this feature. However, I would change some of the other settings to make the page more private. Although I want others to post the page, I do not want it to be anyone. I would enable it so I could approve them to join the page. I am also contemplating on approving posts as well. I would want the school page to be a positive one that contributes to the school community. My concern is that some parents may get angry and post their frustrations in the comments, in which I would like to have full control over those comments getting posted. This way the page only consists of positive comments that foster a well established school community.

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