Sentiments On Common Sense

This just in off my smartbrief update from ASCD. This is an impressive list of ASCD Scholars representing educational leaders from around the world.

School Leadership in Theory and Practice
ASCD Conference Scholars — a group of teachers and administrators from across the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates — are blogging and tweeting about school leadership in theory and in their own practice before, during and after ASCD’s 2010 Annual Conference in San Antonio. Readers can follow them and join the discussion on the ASCD blog and Twitter.

This looks like a great set of conversation starters! Share the link and dive in and participate!

Technorati Tags: ASCD, ASCD Scholars, Blogging, Twitter, ASCD2010

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

My last post, I noted that I often fail at buying/getting gifts for my wife in a weak attempt to make a point.

I apparently made the point, but my wife told me I “never fail” at giving gifts! Marriage is a humbling experience, but it is that sort of positive feedback that makes a guy wanna go out there and buy his wife more gifts just for more positive feedback!

I have been writing a lot lately about the benefits of leadership in schools incorporating blogging into their professional practice. Frankly speaking, I am afraid the message continues to be passed along to the admin in the schools out there by the teachers and tech leaders who can see the forest for the trees and occasionally have some success. Christopher D. Sessums recently did a great post on the “Beginner’s Mind Blogging: A Brief Reflection” that is very well done! The best part of the post, besides to summary text is the YouTube flick of some teachers describing their best efforts to use the Web 2.0 tool in their own professional practice. As he states…

“…a set of fresh eyes, ears, and minds, sharing their reflections on blogging and their “business”

Check it out here.

Following up on the video, Mr. Sessums outlines what he feels is the best part of blogging for himself as an educator-surveyor (I think I will write him to find out what exactly that means), is that he finds his work as a blogger a promotional part of his work. His blog has lifted him to new work and found him able to ply his trade in new ways, in new places, with new people.

Scott McCleod notes in his CASTLE project materials that one of the main reasons for digital leaders to blog is for “Branding”. In a sense, this is what Mr. Sessums is doing in his work. Scott states,

As real estate agents know, perhaps the first question that relocating families want answered is “Where are the good schools?” Certain school districts, and certain schools within districts, have reputations for providing high-quality learning experiences for children. These school organizations are the ones that attract families with high social capital and high-achieving children.

Parents are increasingly checking out school web sites as part of their relocation decision- making. As noted in previous posts, the same messages from the principal that create warm, fuzzy feelings of community, belonging, and academic excitement also are perfect for outsiders who want to see what the school is all about. It would be fairly difficult for a relocating family to acquire several months worth of newsletters, e-mails to parents, etc., but the public availability of a blog ensures that everyone – existing stakeholders, relocating families, realtors, potential corporate partners, and other outside community members – can see the wonderful things that are occurring in the school building.

In my world of competitive school marketing, this is more true that I care to think about day in and day out. The fact that the school down the road gets more kids because of location is hard enough, but if we start to lose clients because of the lack of brand awareness– well– I don’t even want to go down that road with a demanding parent community and board. Parents not only want quality education, they want their school they investing their children’s education into to be a recognizable and highly touted organization as well. In the states it was about allocations of funding. The more kids, the more budget one had to work with through the year. Either way, we want kids in seats till we are full.

Digital leaders do have a bit of a problem though. The problem is that the commitments they hold may prevent them to completing those blog posts. Time is the resource we never have enough of and when we get it we spend it quickly! MIT professor, Dr. Henry Jenkins notes in his blog post Why Academics Should Blog that,

The crucial point is that running a blog is a commitment, and has to be
understood as part of a larger set of professional obligations. When I
first began blogging as an academic, I sought advice from other
bloggers. They stressed that it was important to set a schedule for
publication for your blog and stick with it. It mattered less whether
you blogged once a week or once a day, so long as you were consistent
in putting up material.

Principals and school leaders note the last paragraph carefully. Announce your posting schedule and stick to it! It is NOT about posting daily. It is about posting and posting consistently. Making it part of the professional life and seeing it become “the place” to learn about the school.

Thank you to Scott McLeod, Christopher D. Sessums, Dr. Jenkins and Drew

I wrote this post on the way to the Learning 2.008 conference planning meeting with Jeff Utecht in the van with me and my soon-to-be tech teacher wife Amanda who authors www.sometechsense.com. One of the exciting outcomes of the planning meeting was the opportunity to get involved with the Learning 2.008 EdubloggerCon. Check out Jeff’s link about this upcoming conference and event. This is going to be good folks! Click on the logo to the left to sign up!

One of my former colleagues Reece who is a technology teacher in the Middle East responding to my blog post about blogging administrators asked,

“Interesting post but for clarity, could you define what you think blogging is? I know many staff and students and students at your school 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?”What is the difference from a “blog” with no commenting and a “webpage”.

Side note here: One of the keys to success in communicating to a school community as an administrator is to “know your audience”. That being said, I know my audience here and it is computer users. Let’s face it readers– if you are reading this chances are YOU are a technology user and most like a blogger yourself. So…. ahem…

Reece, as you are well aware, there is no difference between a blog with no commenting being open and a webpage. We have decided to stop calling blogs that are not open to comments “blogs” in my school, instead calling them “information sites” or “web pages”. This all makes sense but the story gets more interesting from here.

All in all sharing information is easy, “sharing” our own web space is tough and a little scary.

Common Sense would tell all of us that a principal or central office administrator better have a high level of trust with their community before laying out thoughts, ideas and information to their community and asking for comments. Even commenting with approval is a door that many administrators may not be willing to go through… at least not immediately. The thought of even more emails to go through and to respond frightens even the most effective communicators and tech-savvy administrators. Some of these ladies and gentlemen get upwards of 100′s of emails a day and many- no MOST- require at least some sort of response.

The funny thing is that my experience last year as a building principal when I opened up commenting on my blog was not that dramatic and the results were as follows (I hope you are all sitting down for this):

- Not a single noteworthy comment.
- One question about busing.
- many hits weekly from my community and from around the world.

Knowing my colleague Reece the way I do, I will predict his response:

“Yea, but Andy, let me play devils advocate here. Did you invite comments?”

Answer: No, I did not. I didn’t go out there and ask questions, ask for responses.

What I did do though was post some response rules that were basic common sense– no cussing, spitting, name-calling, don’t ask personal questions, don’t expect a response to all comments, etc. (smile) I did, on a frequent basis, ask for ideas on things that the readers (primarily my parent community), and I did not a single response.

If you are to go to a few principal’s blogs currently in use on the web, very few have commenting and if they do very few have comments. One has to ask themselves, “Is the world ready for this type of idea exchange, or does this venue for idea exchange really work for schools?”

When giving a gift to my wife (remember: Mom’s day is Sunday May 11th!) I often fail horribly. When receiving my horrible gifts though she kindly reminds me that it is the “thought that counts”.

Perhaps available commenting on a blog is a gift of openness to our school community that shows that not only is your door to your office open but also the virtual door to you as school leader is open too.

I think the risk is low if your commenting guidelines are clear.

BTW.. Reece: I would leave a comment on your blog but you didn’t leave your URL for me!

Technorati Tags: digital leadership, blogging, commenting