Communicating with High School Students

Whether you are a high school counselor or an admissions counselor, you have probably all been scratching your heads trying to figure out the best way to disseminate information to high school students. As a school counselor, I find myself counting on both hands the number of times I have to repeat myself or refer students to the same resource to find information. We have asked students many times at Linn-Mar what the best way is to get information out to them (see table below). You can see that text messaging ranks highest with email and Twitter following closely behind. Below is a list of 5 resources that we have found helpful when communicating with students.

  1. Remind – If you are worried about students having your phone number, Remind is a great free option. However, they changed their terms of service for the free account, so you can only text 10 classes with 150 students or less, but this is great for select groups or for small districts.
  2. Twitter – Our students say they would use Twitter, but I think our Twitter page (@lmcollegecareer) sometimes get lost in the shuffle of their friends’ feeds. We don’t use it as much because we haven’t seen a lot of traffic generated from our site. You can see that we haven’t posted as much this school year! If you aren’t using the site for your students, checking out various professional networks available is also great. Follow @IowaSCAtweets and @IowaACAC to stay up on all the latest news in school counseling and college admissions.
  3. Weebly – How savvy are you when it comes to website design? Weebly is a great tool and I have seen a lot of counselors create really great websites for parents and students to find resources using this. We use Google Sites, but this is a fun alternative with more options!
  4. Canva – Looking for fun fliers that are easy to make AND eye-catching? Canva is perfect! We create fliers and hang them up all around the building to catch students’ eyes. We also try to print in color whenever possible. These are also easily attached to emails as a PDF.
  5. Smore – Smore is another great way to set up a newsletter, however the free account only allows for you to have 3 newsletters available at a time.

What other tools have you used? Do you follow Iowa ACAC on Twitter or Instagram? Check us out!

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