Using the Internet for my governing work…….

In 2009 I set up a twitter account but I really had no idea as to how to go about using it.  In September of 2011 I decided that since most of the governor training that was being offered to me by my Local Authority was not always relevant for what I needed I could perhaps think of using Twitter as a means of networking with other school governors.

This is my journey:

I started of with just tweeting some basic thoughts as a means to familiarizing myself with the social networking tool.  I used the Help facility on Twitter and soon found my way round ‘Retweets’, ‘hashtags’ and all the other twitter jargon.  During this time our school was going through a Hard Federation amalgamation process.  No other school had done this in our Local Authority and so obtaining information was almost impossible.   This is when Twitter came into its own.  I needed to find out how others schools were organising their governing body committees following a hard federation.  I posted one tweet with the hashtag #schoolgovernor and within minutes I had a response and a link to a school website that showed me how other federated schools were running their committees.

This was fantastic….

Since then I have ‘met’ lots of other like-minded school governors, obtained lots of good advice and practical suggestions and also been provided with loads of very useful information on school governing.

Some of those I follow are @moderngovernor @schoolduggery @warwickmansell @ruthagnew

The Modern Governor website does actually run an online training course as to the potential value of Social Networking fo School Governors.  I tend to agree with them.