Meet Your New PD Tool

See how these administrators are using social media to connect with peers—and improve how they run their schools.

Tiffany Della Vedova entered the social media universe gradually. She started with ASCD EDge, an online community of some 33,000 administrators and educators where she still regularly blogs. "I had been reading their publications and blog. And I thought, I'm going to join the conversation. I started blogging and reading other people's blogs. I think people gravitate toward the places that offer them their best human connection."

Then she began following people from EDge on Twitter, and once she got the hang of it, a whole new world opened up. "I realized it's like the largest virtual teachers college out there," she says. "I've learned more over the last year than I have in any kind of professional development conference."

She did so simply by posting questions on Twitter, appending a relevant hashtag, and waiting to see what she got. "We were looking at a new resource for our social studies curriculum and it was all video-based, very multimedia," she says. "I didn't know what equipment was going to be necessary. I wanted to see if somebody could give me feedback. So I ‘hashtized' my question to the social studies chat people. And I said, Is anybody using this resource and can you tell me about it?"

Della Vedova is the academic dean of the Grandview Preparatory School in Boca Raton, Florida. She's been working remotely from New York City since her husband was transferred there, so she is no stranger to technology or social media. Indeed, in order to work with her faculty and teach two English classes, she regularly uses Google Chat, Facebook, videoconferencing, and Skype, among other resources. (She also travels to Florida one week each month for face time.)

But even for her, the breadth of information she's found by way of Twitter is mind-boggling. "I feel overwhelmed. I think, Oh my gosh, there's so much I don't know. But that's the best place to be when you're an educator."

At first glance, Twitter doesn't seem like the place to gather information on how to run a school or craft a curriculum. Its haiku-like format seems more suited for the punchy humor of Albert Brooks or the off-the-cuff literary musings of Salman Rushdie, two well-known Twitterites. But a burgeoning group of administrators is taking advantage of Twitter's ability to reach large numbers of people and its simple method of hashtags to organize topics and discussions-turning it into a 24-hour international information clearinghouse.

Over the past three years, two primary hashtags have emerged among educators and school administrators: #edchat, which has spawned a variety of education-related subgroups, and #cpchat, which stands for "connected principals chat."

Twitter and the various online communities represent a powerful potential resource for administrators, says Mari Pearlman, an education consultant and former senior vice president at the Educational Testing Service. "Principals are geographically isolated-they're one to a building," she says. "They're very busy, and one of the things they really aren't allowed to do as leaders, if they want to be effective, is to share with the people they're leading just exactly how bewildered they feel. They can't go around saying to their teachers, ‘Oh my God, I have no idea what we're going to do about the math scores.'"

Principals who use Twitter echo those sentiments. "It can be such a lonely job ...

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