Improve School Communications & Gain New School PR Tools With Our K-12 Professional Development Options
Our professional development courses on K-12 school communications are designed to help school and district leaders address today's communications challenges. Our courses help you to be better prepared to communicate in various situations and leverage communications technologies and channels to get your message out. Learn more about all of our K-12 professional development options today.
Our Latest Professional Development Courses
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Communicating A Crisis
Do each of your schools have a site-specific crisis communications plan ready in case an emergency situation happens? They should, as small emergencies happen every day in schools everywhere. Threatening online comments or a bomb threat results in a campus lockdown. A fight breaks out among students. Severe weather puts student and staff safety at risk. Intoxicated or non-custodial parents show up at school and demand to pick up their child. Any of these kinds of common emergencies - as well as more dramatic ones like active shooter events - are incidents that all staff members need to be ready to respond to, since parents and others will be looking to school personnel for timely, accurate info on an incident. "Communicating a Crisis" equips school leaders with the knowledge, resources, and strategies to:
- Effectively prevent a crisis from escalating
- Keep stakeholders informed
- Maintain follow-up communication after a crisis
This course, sanctioned by the National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA), will help you develop a crisis communications plan for each of your campuses. Powerful instruction from Rick Kaufman, who served as lead of the Crisis Response Team during the 1999 Columbine High School tragedy, will help you learn how to respond to both everyday problems and complex crisis situations. And expert David L. Voss, whose workshops have reached hundreds of professional communicators, will help you gain the confidence and best practices you need to succeed.
Learning Objectives:
- Assess your readiness to respond to a crisis.
- Assemble your crisis communications team by identifying the key individuals who will serve.
- Assign roles and responsibilities for acting before, during, and after a crisis.
- Prepare a web page that positions your school or district as the primary source of information about a crisis.
- Develop your knowledge and skills to effectively monitor and manage social media.
- Deliver effective communications such as composing messages, preparing public statements and short lists, and conducting media interviews.
- Conduct follow-up activities to maintain communication after a crisis.
- Finalize, share, and critically review a Crisis Communications Plan with staff and stakeholders.
Train your staff on what to say and what not to say, who to respond to and how to respond, with the help of this course on crisis communications.
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Social Media For Schools
This course is customized for educators who don’t do social media for a living yet see it as an opportunity to engage communities and use it for teaching and learning. It is for educators who want to promote their schools and districts while managing both the highs and lows of communicating through social media. It is part inspiration, part information, but mostly, it’s experiential. More than just a learning experience, or a “tip sheet” of advice, this course navigates applied activities and social interaction to answer all questions and provide practice sessions with real-life scenarios. In just 3-4 hours of online action, each person comes away with information, tips, skills and feedback from both the instructor and peers taking the course. This sets each user on a pathway to start, build, enhance and manage social media for schools.
Learning Objectives / Outcomes:
- See advantages, overcome fears and generate buy-in for social media.
- Create or refine a localized district policy and guidelines from best practices.
- Create great content on the right platform and send it out at the right time with the right amount of frequency.
- Manage multiple social media sites on a single platform.
- Build an audience through simple, consistent promotion techniques.
- Respond appropriately to ugly, incorrect, vulgar or confidential posts without escalating the issue.
- Use social media for teaching students in classrooms and professional development for educators.
- Measure how you are doing and learn about your audience with social media analytics.
How Our Professional Development Courses Make An Impact
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Administrators & Staff Members Succeed
Our professional development programs provide leaders and staff members with new abilities they need to meet current challenges. Give your staff the tools and skills they need to thrive.
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Participants Learn From The Best
Our programs offer the best of both worlds – have noted experts and leaders in the field run your professional development workshops, without the expense of bringing them to your campuses or forcing your staff to facilitate their material.
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Instructional Time Is Reclaimed
With our online programs, there’s no need to call off school and send students home to get professional development done. Keep students in class where they need to be while your staff completes courses on their own schedule.
Key Features & Benefits Of Our Professional Development Courses
Talk To Us About Professional Development
For more info about our K-12 professional development programs, or to request a product demo or quote, please fill out the form below and click the “Submit” button.
(If you need to sign up for or opt out of communications from your child's school, please visit our Parent Center for more info.)