As a school leader, it is essential that we highlight all of the positive things happening on our campuses. There is no easier way to do this than through social media.

Well, actually, let me walk that back – it’s not that easy. It takes a ton of work, creativity, and time. But the payoff is a massive reach that truly engages students, families, and our community. After all, if you don’t write the story of your school, who is going to do it for you?

One of the greatest barriers to consistent social media is simply finding the time to gather content. As an administrator, one of my goals is to be in classrooms every week, visible at lunch every day, present before and after school, and at as many campus events as possible. However, reality gets in the way. Between site or district meetings, putting out fires, and the simple fact that I can’t be in two places at once, we needed a solution to increase the volume of photos and videos we were getting.

The burden couldn’t just fall on a few people. If we could get everyone on staff to easily pass along the awesome moments and classroom wins from their day, it would allow our entire team to help write the narrative of our school.

Enter… Google Photos!

Since we are a Google for Education district, the easiest way to get our staff to share pictures was to create a shared Google Photos album. The setup is incredibly simple:

1. Create a Google Photos album.

2. Add a couple of starter photos.

3. Go to “Options.”

4. Turn on “Collaborate” and “Link Sharing.”

5. Share the link with your staff!

From Collection to Creation

Receiving the content is only half the battle. The next step is finding a way to streamline how we actually build the posts for social media and our newsletters. On our campus, we primarily use Instagram and Facebook. Almost every photo dropped into that album gets its own individual spotlight post on our social feeds. Then, to wrap up the week, we pull a handful of those same photos to feature in our weekly parent newsletter.

When it comes to social media, consistency is everything – the more regular your posts, the higher your reach and engagement. While we have a healthy stream of content on our pages, I’ll be the first to admit I could be better about spacing it out. Right now, I tend to do a mad dash and upload everything on Fridays or over the weekend. Spacing things out naturally is definitely one of my big goals for next year!

That being said, creating the actual posts doesn’t take nearly as much time as it used to.

Enter… Google Gemini! (Or your AI of choice)

To speed up our social media workflow, I started an ongoing chat with Gemini. I kicked off the conversation with a very specific system prompt to set the ground rules:

Let this chat serve as a way to help me create social media post texts for [Insert School Name]. Use our hashtags and no other ones: [Insert Hashtags] Don’t use emojis. Make it upbeat, but keep it sounding like a human and keep it student-centered.

You might be wondering about the “no emojis” rule. I don’t have anything against them personally, but to me, a wall of random emojis is a dead giveaway that a post was generated by AI. It’s a personal pet peeve of mine, but feel free to tweak that rule for your own style!

Once that chat history is established, I just feed it a quick bulleted list of details about the photos our staff shared. Gemini does the heavy lifting of drafting the text, and it has cut our creation time exactly in half.

If you want to see this workflow in action, I’ve put together a short video below showing exactly how to set this up, along with a few extra tips and tricks:

3 Big Ways This System Has Transformed Our Campus

In a nutshell, looking back at how this combination of Google Photos and Gemini has shifted our workflow, these are the three biggest wins for our site:

• It crowdsources our culture: Instead of a single administrator trying to capture every moment, our entire staff acts as the eyes and ears of the campus. We get a massive, diverse window into different classrooms that we never would have captured alone.

• It eliminates the “blank page” fatigue: We all know the feeling of staring at a great photo and drawing a blank on what to write. By feeding the raw context to Gemini, we get a solid, student-centered draft in seconds, saving immense mental energy.

• It keeps our story consistent and authentic: Because the collection process is frictionless and the writing process is optimized, we can show up consistently for our community. It allows us to focus less on the mechanics of posting and more on celebrating our students.

If you are looking for a way to save time while still keeping your school’s community connected, I highly recommend giving this workflow a shot.

How does your school handle social media content collection? Do you have any favorite prompt tweaks you use to keep AI sounding human? Let me know in the comments below!