School-Wide Blogging

Posted by arvind s grover Sun, 24 Sep 2006 16:56:19 GMT

My school has leapt into blogging in a big way. We have blogs for every academic department, the heads of the lower, middle and upper schools and each K-4th grade teacher uses a blog as their class news page. I was worried about overwhelming teachers/administrators with yet another thing to do, but most of the responses have been very positive.

We are using Google free Blogger to power all of our blogs. We set them up to publish directly onto our web server, thereby allowing the blogs to be password-protected and just for our community. Eventually I would love to see the blogs become open to the public, but we wanted to start small (concept-wise) and build up.

I think that blogs could easily replace fancy, professionally-designed school websites. Many independent schools hire serious web-design groups to build flashy sites to attract potential families. I subscribe to the Cluetrain Manifesto philosophy which talks about how most marketing is seen as just that by your audience, canned marketing. The book argues that visitors to fancy sites know that it is all marketing and they read them with skepticism. Blogs however give off an air of authenticity. The writing is informal and honest. The topics are micro level instead of macro. People feel like they are getting a real look into the happenings of the school instead of a carefully-crafted image piece. It will take one school to start using their blogs as the public face of their Internet presence and the rest will surely follow. Ok, maybe not surely.

So who will be first? Is it your school? Share the link below so we can all show them to our admins.

Technorati Tags: blog, Blogger, blogging, education, Google, The Cluetrain Manifesto, school

Comments

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TheBizofKnowledge said about 6 hours later:

I certainly share your excitement about entire schools embracing blogging as a communications tool! And I agree that blogs give of an air of authenticity that super-polished websites simply cannot. I hope more educational institutions get on board with blogs and start utilizing more of these free web tools that are available to us all.
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itsazoo said about 9 hours later:

This is my second year using blogs and I love them! It’s been mostly voluntary in my class to post . . . oftentimes kids will go to the library during recess to post as well.

I met most of my upcoming students in the spring, so I invited them to blog over the summer and many who had computers of course did so.
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arvind said 2 days later:

We are using blogs as a school communication tool, but I have also just started using blogs with individual students in my classes. Moodle (moodle.org) now has blogging built in and you can set it up to only let students see other students blogs or allow students to publish to the world. Really great options for schools with Moodle looking to get into blogging.

Anyone else doing fun stuff with blogging?
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Kim Cofino said 6 days later:

I wish I was commenting because my school had successfully adopted an official blogging policy :) Unfortunately I’m one of the only ones that has set up a class blog at my school… And, even more unfortunately, I’m experiencing negative feedback from teachers that are not very excited about seeing this new technology move into the classroom. How did you manage to get everyone on board at your school?
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arvind said 8 days later:

Kim, adoption of new technologies is probably the biggest challenge ed tech folks face. It is a tough question to answer. I have penned a few thoughts on the subject here: http://www.21apples.org/articles/2006/04/25/tech-in-education-where-do-you-start and here: http://www.21apples.org/articles/2006/03/06/naysayers-are-more-important-than-your-supporters

In some cases leading by example can really work. In other cases you need administrative support. Either way, demonstrating educational benefits of the technology must come into play. Show them how excited kids are to blog about literature and faculty will have to listen up. Also, try to get people to see ed tech presenters like Will Richardson and Alan November – always inspirational.

Good luck!