Aug 20 2008
Dispatch from the Road: Communicating as a Administrator who NEEDS to be a Digital Leader pt. 1
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
I enjoyed reading about where you have come from as a communicator. In reflecting on your final questions I think principals are not alone in their reluctance to blog. Witnessing Jeff Utecht and now Simon Power wandering the halls preaching conversion to non-bloggers has been interesting. I think many people are not comfortable stepping outside of their comfort zone and one intimidating aspect of blogging or tech in general to many of these digital immigrants is the vocabulary involved; all the tech-speak language such as RSS feeds, netvibes, upload, widgets, stumble-upon etc etc. To the uninitiated this can be very off-putting.
As someone who has been on an upward learning curve in technology for the last three years, I have embraced all of the good things tech has had to offer in my life, I am becoming a bit of a tech addict and once you get that addiction in your veins it can be all consuming. I can’t wait to see all the changes that occur over the next ten years and for the sake of my children and my students I want to stay at least in the ball-park of what is going on.
Good questions:
I look at it through a corporate filter and the last two ring in my mind:
“Canned” school communications systems are adopted without a consideration of the tool?
Are there “district” policies that block these types of tools??
Hmm. I feel a blog post coming on. Thanks for the inspiration, even if I am post behind.