While educators’ uses of social media for purposes such as professional learning and networking are now well-established, our understanding of how educational institutions use social media—including to engage key stakeholders during periods of crisis—is limited. In this study, we used a public data mining research approach to examine how K–12 school districts in the United States used Twitter as a communication tool during a critical period of the COVID-19 pandemic, March-April, 2020. Through a three-step grounded theory approach of 1,357 district tweets from 492 school districts, we found that districts worked to build community and share time-sensitive announcements in alignment with social media crisis communication recommendations. Announcements were more common during the early stages of the pandemic (and were engaged more collaboratively), with community-building posts more common later on. This study demonstrates how researchers can use publicly available (social media) data to understand districts’ communication priorities and strategies during and beyond periods of crisis.

虽然教育工作者将社交媒体用于专业学习和建立网络等目的现在已经很成熟，但我们对教育机构如何使用社交媒体（包括在危机期间与关键利益相关者互动）的理解有限。在这项研究中，我们使用公共数据挖掘研究方法来研究美国 K-12 学区在 2020 年 3 月至 4 月 COVID-19 大流行的关键时期如何使用 Twitter 作为交流工具。通过三个- 对来自 492 个学区的 1,357 条学区推文进行基于步骤的理论方法，我们发现学区致力于建立社区并根据社交媒体危机沟通建议分享时效性公告。在大流行的早期阶段，公告更为常见（并且参与度更高），社区建设帖子在以后更常见。这项研究展示了研究人员如何使用公开可用的（社交媒体）数据来了解危机期间和之后的地区的沟通优先事项和策略。