Amercian School Board Journal on Blogging by Educational Leaders

What's in a Blog?: Craig Colgan has done an outstanding job detailing the educational uses of blogs, with particular emphasis on educational leaders who have taken up the mantle of conversing with their constituents rather than just talking to (or at) them. Craig and I had a fairly lengthy e-mail conversation about the topic and it was nice to see a couple of quotes from little old me that made it into the article.

There are some great quotes in the article and some excellent examples of how blogging has opened the lines of communication between schools, parents, and community members. Craig's summary of what blogging fundamentally does may be one of the best recaps of the technology that I've seen to date:

What’s revolutionary about this tool is that it puts give-and-take into Web publishing. Before blogging, the Web was pretty much a one-way street. Some distant, technologically advanced entity would create Web content, and the rest of us would wander from site to site viewing it. We might buy a book at Amazon.com or vote in an online poll, but mostly we consumed content others produced. We did not create it or benefit directly from the Web’s ability to share it quickly.

Blogs have broken that chain. Today, almost anyone with rudimentary computer skills can establish a surprisingly sophisticated space on the Web within minutes. The one-way highway is now two way.

My only beef? No active links in the article! Come on folks. How hard is it to add a link to the text when you've already got the URL published right in the article? So, as a public service here are some of the educational blogs cited in the article:

Clayton Wilcox, superintendent of the 114,000 student Pinellas County district has embraced blogging in a big way, as has his community. Sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times (any Palm Beach County news organizations paying attention here?) his blog, simply titled The Classroom receives hundreds of comments to the questions and conversations starters he posts at the blog. Impressive.

Speaking of community input, the Don't Underestimate Charlotte-Mecklenburg blog was created by parents and community members as a place to discuss school-related issues in their community. In a similar vein, parents in Washington D.C. schools have started a similar blog at Fix Our Schools where they agitate for improvements to the physically deteriorating schools in their district by posting photos of schools that are run down and in need of repair.

As the article aptly summarizes, blogging as a tool for communication still has a long way to go in education leadership circles. Here's hoping that more superintendents, principals, school board members, and others who make decisions about the direction of education open up the dialogue with their communities by devoting the (relatively) little time it takes to create, post, and read their own blogs.

Via Will Richardson

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