Apr 24 2008
“Why is it important for school leaders to blog?”
My twitter colleague Brian left me a good question about my last posting! Thanks for reading my blog Brian, and for keeping me honest.
His questions are:
“Why is it important for school leaders to blog?”
“What void does blogging fill?”
Great questions Brian!
First my perspective… in a bit of a story format.
Last year, in response to my communities need for more current and up-to-date information from my school I decided that instead of the monthly epistle from the principal, I would start sending weekly emails to my parent community.
The thing you should know is that I was the principal of two full schools of kids, both elementary and middle school. Yes.. it was VERY busy with lots “stuff” coming at me every week, and I spent long hours communicating to my parent community. These emails were effective, but they also were sent to the black hole of information. No history was being built. No way to archive (easily) and no way to build the communications patterns fully for my community.
I then ran into Scott McCleod’s 100 Principals, 100 blogs project. I am not sure where that project went- I think I was number 30-something… but in a few days of emails, I got a nice note from Scott and I was a “blogger”. Thus began my adventure into school leadership blogging. I have battled a governmental firewall… that would be from China, and all sorts of weird techno problems, but in the end I survive and am able to freely communicate with the world my thoughts, feelings and to develop myself professionally.
To answer Brian’s question:
Blogging is important to me (and school leaders) on several levels.
- First, in order to be an effective leader in our school communities we must be visible and open for feedback. Blogs allow yet another avenue of expression for us, and we can artfully do so while also building in a level of educational influence not only for our students but for their families.
- Modeling effective use of technology for our faculty and showing that “if I can do it, you can too!” means a lot for teachers. I was the first few members of my school community to be a blogger and now we have almost all of our kids grade 5-12 blogging along with the majority of our teachers. I can say the same thing about podcasting, but that is another posting!
- Going back to point #1… It gave me a chance to point my parents to other avenues of education for themselves. This “parent education” portion allowed me to hammer home some of the educational ideals my organization stood for and also made visiting my school information “fun” and “informative” (not my words… but the words of the parents who spoke to me about my blogs).
- Through this process I built a community of learners. Given another year I believe I could have convinced the majority of parents that RSS feeds were the way to go and we could push content, and information so easily I would make our lives as communications creators much easier. I changed jobs this year (within the same organization) and I am not in a position to continue this effort at the same level.
- I saved money. LOTS of MONEY! No paper. No printing costs. No delivery costs. No staff time dedicated to gathering and laying out newsletters.
- I save time. My time. Parents time. Organizational time.
wow!
I didn’t realize how well you could write until this one really hit home for me. I am a little envious when I think of the time it took me to accomplish what little I did in my communication efforts with “my” community compared to what you are able to do. Not that it doesn’t take a lot of thought and organization to be able to “talk” to parents via your blog. Administrators too many times think they have more important things to deal with than to work with their clientel who ultimately hold them accountable. In your blogs you also able to put your words and ideas out for everyone to see. No hiding behind behind the spoken word which may be interpreted in the wrong way. If someone wants to question what you have written you can at least explain it more clearly using specific information.
Good job and keep up the good work. ET
Excellent, those we’re the detail I needed in convincing the leadership at our school. They are now on board and want to start blogging. Now I’m stumped, which direction do I recommend. They’re to many blogging options, wordpress.com, edublogs.org, blogger plus so many more. What’s the perfect blogging site? If, you had the chance to do it all over again, what would you do differently?
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Hey Andy,
Interesting post but for clarity, could you define what you think blogging is? I know many SAS staff and students use blogging software but do you think that many of them are actually “blogging”? I ask because it’s very hard to find good examples of student or class blogs (so does Will Richardson BTW: http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/looking-for-student-blogging/) so I’m interested in learning more about administrator’s blogs. Are you conversing back and forth with the parent community via your blog and linking to connected themes and ideas or are you using it to post a recap of the week? If it’s the latter, why not say you’ve got a website rather than a blog?
Thanks for the insight.
[...] professional development to the needs of administrators. Andrew Torres wrote a great post about Why School Leaders Should Blog. He articulates well the benefits that blogging brings to the entire school community. Dennis [...]