How Twitter Bingo Can Help You Tell Your School's Story

Three years ago, a fellow assistant principal (Holly Sutherland) and I hosted our first "Twitter PD Party" at school. We spent the day in the library conference room and invited teachers to join us during their planning periods to have a cookie and learn to tweet.

Last year, I hosted our second Twitter PD Party, and in the blog post I wrote about it, I shared the resources we used for the party, including our Twitter Challenge which included a chance to win a Starbucks gift card. In conjunction with our third annual twitter PD party this month, I also ran a Twitter Bingo game which was a huge hit with our participants (more at the end of this blog post.)

This year, I spent a day in our conference room (of course with cookies) to work with teachers on using twitter to build a PLN and tell our school's story using our school hashtag. 

The teachers who attended the Twitter PD Party were entered into a drawing for a $10 iTunes gift card. 

This year we had two winners - one who was experienced with twitter and one who was a "newbie" to twitter.

New to this year was the addition of a Twitter Bingo board. The challenge was sent to all staff members, and the time frame was September 1 - September 16th. During that time, teachers "competed" to be entered into a drawing for First prize or for the Grand Prize. Click here for the pdf of the bingo board or click the picture above. 

All tweets were tagged with our school's hashtag, #HooverPride, and it was wonderful to see all of the images as part of telling our school's story on twitter. (You can check out the hashtag HERE.) 

One of our teachers even created an artistic bingo board!

I shared the names of the winners with the staff yesterday, and I will deliver lunch next week to the Grand Prize winner. 

Playing Twitter Bingo gave our teachers purpose for tweeting, which helped them to understand the power of twitter to a great extent. I plan to make it part of our annual back-to-school activity!

How does your school teach teachers about Twitter? I would love to hear in the comments or tweet me, @jennifer_hogan.