People around us—students, teachers, parents, and the community at large—want to know what we're doing in our work. One of the ways to celebrate the wide variety of positive efforts happening in our classrooms, schools, and meetings is to share that via a blog. The blog replaces the tough to maintain classroom web sites of yesterday, enabling you to keep colleagues and parents up to date.
Blog entries are often short, immediately relevant to events in work settings, and time-sensitive. It is impossible for any one person or office to keep up with all the wonderful things that you are involved in, but you can. You can publish content at will, but your items should provide insight into what is happening and should always remain professional.
By sharing what each of us is doing, we are able to engage in proactive conversations that focus on the positive work we are doing as educators.
I like the common-sense advice you give:
ReplyDelete"You can publish content at will, but your items should provide insight into what is happening and should always remain professional."
I think one of the reasons people are intimidated by writing is they think they don't have anything of value to say. Either that, or they believe what they want to say isn't interesting. Quite the contrary. You can make the mundane interesting if you tie it to something you enjoy. For instance, I just learned how to publish a blog post using the "Publish" function in Word 2007. Word 2007 is boring, but, when you link it to something interesting, it becomes something engaging to read.
Kathy,
ReplyDeleteI like your comment about blog entries.
"Blog entries are often short, immediately relevant to events in work settings, and time-sensitive."
Stakeholders need information in small bits and in a timely fashion. While in the classroom it always upset me to see the school's weekly newsletter in the children's backpacks for weeks at a time unread. I think that the blog entries could be even further simplified by sending them out in text message form on cell phones. I work in a community where very few parents have computers or computer access, but all of them have cell phones. We have to meet the parents where they are in order to make a difference for their children.