Shadowing Students + Sharing Stories

A guide to Medium

We’re excited to be partnering with School Retool and the Shadow a Student Challenge! Our goal is to help you share your shadowing stories far and wide so others can get a glimpse into your experience.

We want to create a space where folks at every level come together to share ideas, stories and spark conversations that engage a broad audience, and provides real value to educators both inside and outside of the community.

Here’s a quick guide, just for you.

[For the live online walkthrough, click here on Wednesday, March 2nd at 3pm PST / 6pm EST for the white glove treatment and to ask any questions!]

I.
Sign Up

Head to Medium and hit the ‘Sign Up’ button. We recommend signing up with Twitter and/or Facebook, as it will help start you off with a group of people to follow and make your content feed more exciting. [Note: Medium will never, ever, ever post any of your Medium content on Twitter or Facebook without your explicit permission.]

II.
Follow Tags, People, + Publications

Start by going through the onboarding flow. Follow stuff that interests you! If you want to go for an education-based experience, follow tags (like Education, Teaching, and Edtech), publications (like these), teachers (like the Teachers Guild’s Jessica Lura, Rusul Alrubial, AltSchool’s Paul France, and Matthew R. Morris to name a few), and others like LearnZillion’s Eric Westendorf.

Also, if you follow me, I can help curate for you: every time I hit ‘recommend’ on a post, it will automatically populate your content feed (similar to how a retweet works).

III.
Download the App

Available in iOS and Android. You can both read and write on mobile. Trust me, it’s awesome.

IV.
Start Writing + Responding

Writing on Medium is rather easy. Here’s a VIP Guide (start w/section two):

An Insider’s Guide to Publishing on Medium

Please make sure to tag all of your posts with both ‘Education’ and ‘Shadow a Student’— this will make your posts more easily discoverable to the community. You can add a third tag relevant to whatever area you’re writing about.

Make sure to tag your story!

V.
Spread the Word

Don’t be shy. Share the link to your work on Twitter and Facebook, and email everyone you know asking them to build on your ideas with their own perspectives.

If you have any questions, please just drop me (gabe@medium.com) a line.