Springfield Elementary School is embracing the social media sites as new avenues to connect with parents, enhance learning and collaborate with other educators

SPRINGFIELD — In Chelsie Weaver's fourth-grade classroom at Springfield Elementary School, pieces of paper are pinned to a bulletin board that read "Tweet What's Neat."

Throughout the day or at the end of a unit, students can jot down snippets of things they learned or thought were cool — in 140 characters or less. Weaver then selects a few to tweet out to their parent followers.

Updating the classroom's Twitter page has now become a daily practice since the pre-K-6 school embraced social media to connect with parents, enhance learning and collaborate with other educators around the world.

"(Parents) want to feel involved in their school life just as much as their home life," Weaver said. "I want to bridge that gap and bring them to the classroom — even if it's virtually."

Springfield is no stranger to technology. The school has interactive Smart Boards in the classrooms, a Chromebook for every student in grades 4 to 6 and iPad carts that are used for class work and educational games.

The leap to Twitter was incremental, said Superintendent Edith Conroy, who was inspired to begin the initiative after reading Eric Sheninger's "Digital Leadership: Changing Paradigms for Changing Times" over the summer with fellow administrators.

Teachers began sharing "tweetable" moments with her to post on the school's feed, but as they became more familiar with it, they started their own classroom accounts — and now every teacher has one.

"We can share with our community the exciting things that are happening inside our classrooms," Conroy said. "It's more powerful than writing in a newsletter."

The tweets offer a glimpse into their days and the projects they're working on, from first-graders using "whisper phones" to read aloud while they revise their writing to fifth-graders making replicas of the solar system.

#stwps Tweets

Conroy said it can be a conversation starter between parents and kids who often answer "What did you do in school today?" with "Nothing."

"They can say, 'I saw you're writing a narrative or ... I saw you did an experiment,'" she said. "It's a great way to have those conversations."

John Acampora, supervisor of curriculum and instruction, said Facebook tends to be more popular among parents than Twitter, but they're trying to encourage parents to sign up. Cutouts of the site's blue bird are hung up in the classrooms for every parent follower they have.

"Parents can see exactly what they're doing and feel like they're there," Acampora said.

Conroy said that she hopes in the future, classes will tweet back and forth at each other, chat with an author whose book they are reading or connect with peers from another part of the world.

"The educational possibilities are endless," she said.

Conroy stressed that while technology can be a useful educational tool and helps keep students engaged and motivated, it is not meant to be a substitute for quality education.

"The lesson should be driven by great pedagogy and great instructional practices, then technology should come second as a way to enhance the lesson and make it better," she said.

The school is also encouraging teachers to use Twitter as a way to collaborate, share resources and ask for advice from the thousands of teachers who teach the same grade or subject.

"We're a small school so they're very limited in their collaboration," Acampora said. "We're trying to push them to reach out and build a professional learning network."

He said there are dozens of weekly Twitter chats that provide a forum for them to learn.

"The Twitter world is huge," said Justin Schleider, a physical education and health teacher. "Teachers can reach out to other teachers and experts, talk about best practices, what they're doing, what they're learning, connect on projects."

Schleider hosts his own physical education chat, #slowchatpe, where he tweets out one question each day over the course of the week, allowing participants to share at their own pace.

Twitter, he said, has provided him with a wealth of knowledge and support.

"My teaching has gone through the roof because of this," he said. "It's free professional development. I only know what I know until my eyes are opened up."

Cristina Rojas may be reached at crojas@njtimes.com. Follow her on Twitter @CristinaRojasTT. Find The Times of Trenton on Facebook.