We encourage you to get involved in the CEP online community in as many ways as you are able. Spread this task out among interested staff members and consider involving staff who like to write, are familiar with using social media, and might enjoy this role. This can be a great way to involve younger teachers in leadership positions, for example. At the same time, you will want to be sure your more experienced character educators are sharing knowledge and best practices online as well.
The CEP website and online community will be constantly evolving and new opportunities will arise. CEP will keep you posted about these changes and opportunities so that you can stay connected and involved.
Pathable Discussion Groups (before, during, and after the Forum)
CEP is excited to introduce a new online community as part of this year’s Forum. Unlike Facebook, our Pathable community is a private, online community hosted on CEP’s website, made up exclusively of Forum attendees. The community will last for one year, allowing you to network with and elarn from other attendees before, during, and after ther Forum. You will receive an invitation to join the Pathable community once you register for the Forum. See the Pathable Discussion Page to get a better idea of what our community will look like.
Through Pathable, attendees will be able to participate in discussions on character education-related topics (e.g. “How can I prevent bullying at my school?”). NSOC leaders are encouraged to facilitate one of these dicsussions. This is a great chance for you to share your knowledge on an area of excellence at your school, as well as learn from other NSOC and attendees. Possible discussion topics include the following:
- Creating strong, supportive school communities
- Engaging parents as partners
- Character and academics
- Bullying prevention
- Building positive school climate
- Getting staff buy-in
- Or another area of excellence at your school
Responsibilities of facilitating a discussion include starting the discussion, keeping dialogue going by replying to questions or comments within the discussion, and adding new ideas, links, or points of interest (with CEP’s support). Please contact cdreibelbis@character.org if you are interested in facilitating a discussion within our online Forum community.
CEP Webinars
CEP began a successful webinar series in 2012. It is our hope that future webinars will include NSOC leaders as experts in character education best practices and the implementation of the 11 Principles. CEP may reach out to you with such opportunities. If you are especially interested in helping to facilitate a webinar, please contact Lara Maupin at lmaupin@character.org or Barbara Luther at bluther@character.org.
Articles/Blog Posts
At any time, we encourage you to contribute a brief, compelling article (500 words or less) to CEP for posting on our website, blog, or electronic newsletter – or to respond to other CEP articles and blogs posts. Think about character-related issues important to you and your school community and write about them!
CEP’s Blog is a place for CEP and friends to post thoughtful commentaries on current events, educational issues, or hote topic debates. It is also a place that can be used to highlight themed, as well as Forum, highlights. Staff members at NSOC are welcome contributors!
Consider how you can get online discussions going among character educators. Contact Katie Hood at khood@character.org with your ideas.
The first step is to “like” CEP’s Facebook Page and encourage staff and the school community to get involved, if they would like, by also “liking” our page. This allows you to follow along with any updates we provide and more easily discover what CEP, similar organizations/groups, and other schools are doing.
Any time a staff member from your school has something thought-provoking or newsworthy to share, we encourage posting to Facebook. Consider posting items of interest to character educators such as articles of note, publicity for your school, successful programs or classroom strategies. Generate discussion on hot topics that connect to our mutual efforts in character education. CEP contributes daily to its Facebook page and is always looking for ways to increase interactivity, so keep an eye out for updates on new features and ways to interact with fellow educators.
Also consider creating a Facebook page for your own school (or district), if one has not yet been created and district policy allows for it. Be sure to “like” CEP’s page and we will like your school’s page back to increase interactivity. You can create your own space to publicize school eforrts, not just those related to character education, allowing you to reach out to other educators and showcase your own efforts. We suggest that a teacher or staff member already familiar with social media tools take charge of such a page to keep adding new content. See the page for The Blake School, a 2009 NSOC, and the one for Eagle Rock, a 2012 NSOC, for examples of school pages that really work.
Facebook allows you to post plain text, links, and photos. To create a post on CEP’s page:
- To simply write a post, click in the box that says “Write something…” and start typing.
- To provide a link, start typing the same way you would to write a post and “copy and paste” the link where you would like it to appear. Facebook will automatically try to find some text and a picture to go with your link from the webpage itself. You can choose among the photos it finds available or click the check-box to not display a picture next to your link.
- To upload a photo or an album from a special event, click on the option above the text box for “Photo/Video” and follow those instructions to include a photo and short explanation.
- To simply reply to or comment on something someone else posted, click the word ”Comment” under the post.
Once you’re done, click “Share” and your post will be added to our page. You may need to refresh the page for it to show up.
Blake and Eagle Rock are again great examples of schools using Twitter. Do you have anyone at your school who uses Twitter? Encourage them to “follow” CEP and consider creating a school account. We’ll “follow” you back and together we can spread the message of character development and your school’s achievements. CEP’s Twitter feed features tons of great articles and lesson planning tools that can be a great resource for educators. You can access our Twitter feed by clicking on the teal “t” in the top righthand corner of our homepage.
Successful use of Twitter often requires constant vigilance, or at least daily or weekly check-ins, to see what is being said and get in on the conversation. It can be used to highlight your own news, resources, and events, as well as respond to other posts and hot topics. CEP often “re-tweets” information that other users have posted but that we feel our audience would be interested in hearing about as well.
Once on Twitter, click the “@” in the top right-hand corner to see who has connected with you (begun following you, retweeted or mentioned you in a post) and click the “#” symbol to see what hot topics are currently trending.
Some quick guidelines on Twitter language:
- Tweet: A post on Twitter. Must be no more than 140 characters, including spaces. Because of this, it is often helpful to shorten links by putting them through an automatic link-shortening generator such as http://bit.ly.
- @: Precedes a Twitter account name allowing the Twitter user to see that you are posting directly to them. No space between the symbol and the name (@CEPnews) not (@ CEPnews).
- RT: Stands for ReTweet and refers to posting the text of someone else’s tweet in your own stream of tweets. RT is followed by the original poster’s name (RT@CEPnews).
- #: Precedes a hot topic item. In the “Twitterverse” this is called a “hashtag.” Twitter automatically turns the word following this symbol into a link that yields a search of recent tweets also using that hashtag and word following it. No space between any of the words. Some commonly occuring topics include:
- #charactereducation
- #bullying
- #education
- #edreform
- #edchat
- #teachers
Please try to make use of “#NSOC” or “#nationalschoolofcharacter” when appropriate in your posts, as we are trying to create a community that will allow schools to easily connect with each other.
Pinterest lets you organize and share pictures you find on the web. You can create pinboards to share lesson plans, classroom organization ideas, pictures of your school, etc. CEP’s Pinterest features our National Schools of Character, Promising Practices, lesson plans, and other areas of interest to teachers.
Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.
Linked In
Since many educators are weary of connecting online in other social media arenas, Linked In provides a more secure way for people to connect professionally. CEP’s Linked In profile has some information about the company, and you can add yourself to our professional network. When you list yourself as a member of an NSOC through Character Education Partnership, you will be able to connect with CEP’s other connections, creating a rich and vibrant professional community in which to network and share.
