Don’t be surprised if #Goodwin becomes a trending topic in the Bethesda area: principal Alan Goodwin now communicates with students and parents through social media — using no more than 140 characters.

Goodwin issued his first official tweet Jan. 3. “Happy New Year!” he tweeted. “I visited classrooms today, and students were more alert than I expected on day #1.”

He joined Twitter recently in an effort to broadcast school news updates and communicate better with students and parents.

“It’s a different way to inform,” Goodwin said. “I’ll try to do one [tweet] each day if it’s something relevant; I don’t want to just fill the airways with nonsense. I hope to make my Twitter somewhat interesting by not just reporting school events but sometimes [posting] an allusion to a poet, a writer or an article.”

New MCPS superintendent Joshua Starr is encouraging principals to embrace Twitter as a new medium to connect to the community, Goodwin said. Parents also approached Goodwin last year and suggested joining the site.

“Although I have not been a major techie in the past, I decided that I would give it a try,” Goodwin said. “I already felt as though I communicated enough, but I decided I would try it. Right now, it’s a novelty.”

Goodwin’s tweets will focus on school events to update the community, he said. For example, he’ll post on Twitter after attending school-related meetings, athletic events or awards ceremonies, he said.

He also plans to follow Starr’s example in posting links to educational and informative articles.

“[Starr] uses it very effectively,” Goodwin said. “He does a lot of referrals to articles that he finds interesting, and — I don’t know how to do this yet — he’ll retweet a tweet that he thinks we should read.”

So far, Goodwin has just over 100 followers, but he said he hopes to expand his audience. Though he hasn’t received responses from students yet, parents have reacted favorably to the move, he said.

But some parents worry they will miss important messages if they don’t have Twitter accounts, Goodwin said. He emphasized that tweets will supplement, not replace, his usual methods of communication.

Goodwin doesn’t follow any students as of now, but if he does in the future, he said he wouldn’t use it as a way to monitor students outside of school.

“I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility,” he said. “Right now, I am only following a couple people because I don’t want to spend too much time on Twitter. I don’t know that I want to use it to look for crime and punishment; I’d rather keep it positive. Will I follow a student? Yeah, for instance, somebody on the Black & White or maybe a student government person, that kind of thing. But I haven’t yet.”

Follow Goodwin @Whitprincipal or view his Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/whitprincipal.