Sentiments On Common Sense

The Tunnels in Shanghai are amazing and provide easy (albeit never quick) access to the other side of the Huangpu in various locations around the school. Having just dipped under the river and emerged on the Pudong side, I see before me the haze of Shanghai summer. The weather here has been nothing short of bad since we arrived back. I think all the smog of Beijing has been governmentally transported to Shanghai during the Olympics.

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In my last posting, I wrote about why I used blogging as a communcations tool. Having surveyed the landscape of blogs out there I need to say a few things that should be perceived as guiding suggestions— or a simple list of do’s and don’t for Administrators out there who NEED to be digital learners.

Blog post design
In the case of blog posts for community members, remember the old adage that less is more! Do yourself and your readers a favor and keep your posts to a minimum and if you MUST post everything organize the most important at the top (like this suggestion) and put the less important part at the bottom.

How do I know this you ask? First of all, there is plenty of information on the web that guide you to this conclusion, and if you must, just check out some of the most effective educational leaders blogs out there. I also embedded into my blog (this one included) google analytics code so I can measure the amount of time spent on each page. What a sad fact to have a mere 2-3 seconds average screen time on a page of 4-5 screens of text. Even the best online reader will not be able to gulp that much information that quickly. So. Keep it to the point.

For more tips go to http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html

Pictures
Pictures really do communicate well, but don’t overload the screen. I put digital cameras in people’s hands and created a library of school pictures to use. Be sure to stay in compliance with your school policy on student pictures on the web, and somehow keep track of which ones your have used. Consider establishing a school Flickr account. Flickr is now blocked here in China so we are building our own media server to make this possible in our school, but Flickr does a great job of creating a library of images, and the price is fairly inexpensive.

Oh…and save the poor readers out there with low bandwidth. Scale your photos for faster downloads! If you don’t how to do this, then find a tech support person and ask. It is EASY!

SAME FONTS, SAME SIZE— EVERY TIME.
Nothing says “amateur” more than inconsistencies like this. Decide what looks good and stick to it. If you need to switch up to another theme or style, do it a opportune times like vacations, holidays, the end of quarters or semesters. If you would consider using a comic font on your printed newsletter, I suppose I would agree that would be ok on the web, but save me the labor of having to read it. Simple sans-serif fonts like this one will get your many more nods of appreciation from your readers.

Themes and Color
So much can be lost with a “cute” theme. My wife’s blogs for my daughters are allowed to be cute. A prinicipals communications tool should be sharp, professional and inspire confidence and demonstrate competance. Swirls, stars and colors “not found in nature” aside, keep to clean simple lines and a consistent banner for easy recognition. Use color for impact. Use your theme as a recognition tool.

Use your blog to show you’re a digital leader!

Technorati Tags: Digital leadership, blogging, design guidelines

The van keeps rolling and I keep typing and China keeps rolling by my window. The roads in Shanghai are dirty at best and bumpy and in extreme disrepair at the worst. The most amusing thing about this city is that shop owners seem to be extremely specialized. Even down to a shop full of a single item. At the last stop light was a shop which only sold pipe. Just pipe. Nothing else. In a city of over 20 million people, I guess there is enough people needing pipe to keep the family fed. Go figure.

At our administrative retreat this last week, the conversation came up among my colleagues that still remains unfinished. The question: “What does an administrator as a digital leader need to do to be an effective communicator?”

As a building principal I have in my short administrative career of 11 years using four modes of print based communications. The first is the tried and true newsletter I refer to as the principal’s epistle. These long, multipage documents were created on a monthly basis to get current information out to our community members about the great things that were happenning in our schools. Mine were at one point in my career (dating myself here) printed on the old purple flood , and my poor support staff spent hours collating, stapling and arranging these documents only to have ten or twenty “lost” newsletters in the hallways, lockers or (heaven forbid) in a teacher’s trash can– the paper victims of a forgotten home packet on a busy Friday afternoon.

Next effort on my part was basic email. After careful conversation with my parent advisory group, I moved to weekly email to supplement and later supplant the epistle. Like the newsletter, this messaging method grew to be more than weekly and encompass screen after screen after screen. The information was timely, but like a lost paperboy, I found my Principal messages were not delivered due to junk mail filters, blocked addresses and downright lazy readers who didn’t like the format because they couldn’t sniff the pages like they were still in high school! Seriously, one mom stated that email is so hard because there is no excuse for not reading it and yet there is so much information to be taken in at any given time.

Upon moving to my next school, I found the organization used a “canned” web-based communications portal that allowed for little customization and a lot of content. It worked well enough but to no surprise for me, once you gave the parents a little taste of web-based communications, they wanted more of it with more capabilities. They wanted read/write web 2.0 components, automatic notifications and subscription capabilities. The system couldn’t do it. It was also ssssssssllllllllllllloooooooooooowwwwwwwww and painfully button-filled. In other words, it was ugly. Period.

The last thing I have tried, in print-format, is a principals blog. What made this more successful than the emails and the web-based “canned” communcations tool?

1. It was mine. I represented the school and it reflected my personality. I was able to demonstrate in the digital two-dimensions who I was as the educational leader of the school.

2. It allowed for subscription/syndication. Through RSS feeds, parents who wanted access to the blog could have my online communications pushed to them in aggregators or email. This was very, very effective.

3. It allowed me to be a teacher of the community, providing links and resources in one place at one time.

4. It put my school on the world stage and allowed me to build a brand name for my organization.

5. It was open enough that it allowed me to continue conversations that began in my “meet the principal” meetings and continue to the online forum.

6. It showed my teachers that I meant business about transforming the way we do our work and delivering educational content to our parent community and with our students. In a sense leading by example.

7. It was easy. Just cut and paste. Put in a picture. Publish. Done. No secretary time. No smelly purple stuff. No paper. It was archived so parents could go back again and again. The best record keeper for communications I ever had for sure!

It doesn’t take long to realize that I was quickly convinced that this method works and when the demands of communications increased I was able to continue to respond in short, effective bursts of messages that made a difference in the life of the school.

More on this subject tomorrow!

**Closing note:

If you have ever taken the time to do a little searching you will note that there are not many principal’s that do blog.

Why not?

Too much time?

To scary a step technologically?

“Canned” school communications systems are adopted without a consideration of the tool?

Are there district policies that block these types of tools??

Technorati Tags: digital leadership, blogging, principal blogs

It is my second trip over to the other campus in this week and since it is Tuesday, that means I have not been to my own office at all…. and things are a bit of a muss and fuss. It looks like I am missed when I am away!! That being said, the work here this last couple of weeks has been steady and busy. Being back in Shanghai is good, and being back with trusted colleagues is good. Not being on vacation is bad. Fortunately for my waistline, vacation does not continue forever though!

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About this time of year in 1986 I started teaching in a large suburban school in Oregon. I learned that, through luck, I had been hired to a “good school”. Being young, fairly naive, and just wanting a paycheck and to get “on with my life”. I put my head down and started pushing forward with my work. I worked to keep pace with my colleagues. My fellow teachers were dedicated, hard working and master instructors. I watched, I learned and I figured out right there in that little room with 32 kids that what makes a “good school” is GREAT teachers!

Now as a school administrator some 22 years later I am reminded once again by the talent that surrgounds me that we must honor, focus and renew our human capital in our schools or our “good schools” will decend to less that what we need and want. We need to build on our most expensive resource, our human resource!

I was reminded of this in a meeting this last week as I was sitting in a room with 7 very dedicated and focused digital leaders from our school. Each and everyone of these people are the type that allow me to be better at my job. I, as a joke, sent a twitter message out to my former colleague and friend jutecht saying (with a smiley)… “Sitting here wondering what jutecht did at work last year!” Knowing that Jeff over did everything he took on and did it better than I personally ever expected.

Jeff, being tuned into my twisted sense of humor responded as only he can by first entering a twit about a piece of work he was concentrating on and then a follow up @ message to me saying “atorris, see prior message”.

Hmpf! The guy is a 4 hour flight away and he still gets me! Jeff, from a school perspective was a strong human resource investment and left way more in terms of learning capital behind due to his work than when he arrived.

Around that table that day we as group worked to come together and face the facts that reliance on each other and learning from each other was not just a way to get better, but also to a matter of survival for us and the digital initiatives we hope to focus on through the next two academic years. Work got divided up. People took on new learnings and are already making a difference. My colleagues are workin’ it and bringing resources to the classrooms in a more effective and dynamic way.

I need to build them up, put them in front of the community as they will impress all to whom they come in contact and reinforce the fact that our school is a “good school”. Some would venture to say a “great school”.

Technorati Tags: digital leadership