Much attention has been paid to the value of teachers and/or students blogging. In this article, I’d like to discuss the potential value of blogging by K-12 administrators. Although my comments primarily focus on principals, the same advantages are analogous to superintendents, technology coordinators, and other central office administrators. This series of posts stems from Chapter 4 of The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil. So... why blog as an administrator?

Reason 1: Sharing news and events

Blogs are ideal for principals to quickly post news items for their school communities. Upcoming special events, recent awards won by students or staff, classroom highlights, reminders, lunch menus, extracurricular activities, deadlines, and other newsletter-type items are extremely well-suited for blogs and are quick and easy ways to keep a school community informed.

• Example of a news item blog post
• A second example

Reason 2: Progress monitoring

Community members often are interested in the progress of a school's ongoing activities. Examples might include building a new facility, implementing new curricula, hiring new staff, trying to pass a levy or referendum, and other school initiatives. Regular posts to update stakeholders on the progress of these types of activities can go a long way toward building goodwill and keeping community members informed.

• Example of a progress monitoring blog post

Reason 3: Status alerts

Another type of blog post might be a quick message to alert the community of a short-term problem, event cancellation, etc. Status alerts will be most effective when the community knows to go to the blog for the latest news.

• Example of a status alert blog post

Reason 4: Marketing

Because they're electronic, blogs are both faster and less costly than paper communications. If the savings in paper alone aren't persuasive, administrators should consider additional advantages that blogs often have over other communication channels.

Web sites and paper newsletters are static, noninteractive, and often dated (who wants to read about something two weeks after it occurred?). E-mails, electronic newsletters, and/or listservs contribute to clogged inboxes and get caught by spam filters. In contrast, blogs are timely, interactive, and avoid some of the issues that accompany e-mail communications.

If done well, blogs can "create buzz [and] loyal customers" (Weil, 2006, p. 53). One of parents' biggest criticisms of schools is that teachers and administrators don't communicate often enough about the things that parents want to hear about. Blogs can be a great way to publicize the great things that are occurring in schools.

Reason 5: Public relations

As Weil (2006) notes, a blog is a great way to bypass local media and get "your own version of the story out there and to get feedback" (p. 52). This can be either proactive or reactive. If administrators only put out their spin after some incident occurs, the message will be much less effective. School communities are going to be much more receptive and trusting if an administrator has built up goodwill beforehand through an ongoing series of posts and dialogues about less important issues.

Frequent, transparent communication, with the opportunity to receive feedback through comments, is a strength of blogs that administrators can leverage to their school organization's advantage.

Reason 6: Community building

Blogs can be an excellent tool for facilitating feelings of community within a school organization. Whether a blog serves an internal or external audience, regular posts can keep stakeholders informed of important events as well as those incidents that might go unnoticed in the hectic day-to-day activity of schools. If you read the administrator blogs at Lewis Elementary School (OR) or Mabry Middle School (GA), you can see that the ongoing stream of news, updates, and highlights can't help but contribute to feelings of connectedness by students, staff, parents, and other community members.

Blogs are different than e-mail listservs and static Web pages because they're interactive. When a principal sends out an e-mail over a listserv or posts a notice on a web page, there is no way for the school community to interact with that message. If someone has a question or comment, it either doesn't get made or it's merely a one-to-one communication with the principal via e-mail, voice mail, or telephone call. In contrast, the comments feature of blogs allows anyone to post a question or comment, and thus everyone else in the community can see it, see the principal's (or someone else's) response, and add his or her own two cents to the conversation. The blog thus facilitates ongoing dialogue between multiple school stakeholders rather than being a static one-way, or maybe two-way, transmission. What blogs can do, that listservs and Web pages can't, is facilitate conversation.

Reason 7: Customer relations

Of course, all of this is good for customer relations. Principals who are actively and publicly interacting with school stakeholders, listening to their concerns, responding to those concerns and other questions, and generally being accessible (Weil, 2006, p. 56) are facilitating good customer relations and building goodwill within the school community. Parents, community members, staff, and students are going to feel more positively about the school when they have the opportunity to not only get frequent updates about what is going on but also ask questions, post concerns, give suggestions, etc. This openness—this overt transparency—builds stakeholder confidence and satisfaction with the direction and activities of the school.

Reason 8: Branding

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. 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.

Reason 9: Creating "customer evangelists"

Customer evangelists are those individuals that are passionate about the school and publicly advocate for the school to others. They do this of their own volition—they are not paid to do so. These are the people that talk about how great the school is to everyone they meet. They help build the reputation and the buzz of the school organization and contribute to overall feelings of satisfaction by staff, parents, students, and community members.

Evangelists are important contributors to a school's success. Indeed, as Malcolm Gladwell and others have noted, evangelists may be the only information source that others trust and believe. Nearly everyone is experiencing overload from an unlimited variety of information sources—evangelists are the folks that capture people's attention and sway opinion.

Blogs give evangelists something to talk about. Regular updates, news items, and other highlights feed the conversations that evangelists are having with others. These people can make or break a school's reputation—administrators would be wise to feed them well on a steady diet of positive information.

Reason 10: Thought leadership

A blog can be a great place to put thoughts out there for the community to chew on. Is a school considering a new initiative or an important change? Does the school want feedback on a particular topic or issue? The principal could post some information and questions on the blog and solicit community participation. This is similar to setting up a meeting with an advisory board or interested group of stakeholders, except that the potential reach is much greater since everyone in the school community can see and participate in the conversation, not just the few individuals who might attend a face-to-face meeting.

Reason 11: Advocacy

A blog also can be a good place to advocate for certain actions. For example, if state legislators were considering legislation that might negatively impact schools in some way, a principal could post a message encouraging stakeholders to become informed about the issue and let their local legislator know their opinion about the matter. Similarly, a blog can be a great place to foster community support for an upcoming levy or referendum. Regular progress updates can keep community members informed and help facilitate increased voter participation and support for the referendum.

Reason 12: Replacing the school Web site

Finally, some schools are utilizing blogs to replace key sections of their web sites. Sometimes blogs replace the school's home page; other times they're a prominent link from the home page. Blogs would be a great tool for FAQs, for ongoing updates about athletic and other extracurricular programs, to replace teachers' classroom newsletters to parents, to post news about upcoming or past events, etc. Blogs also can be used for internal communications to staff.

That's it! Twelve reasons why an administrator's blog might be a good thing for a school organization. Increasing numbers of corporate leaders are seeing the value of blogging - maybe it's time your school or district considered it too!

References

Weil, D. (2006). The corporate blogging book: Absolutely everything you need to know to get it right. New York, NY: Portfolio.

Interested in pursuing this topic further?

1. Download a PDF version of this document and disseminate it to other leaders in your school organization.
2. See more examples of how principals are using blogs to enhance their communications with parents, community members, and other stakeholders.
3. Sign up for a free principal blog from the Principal Blogging Project and try out this new communication mechanism yourself.
4. Share this freely and encourage others to do the same. Right now it is very hard to find administrators who are blogging, despite the advantages I articulated above. Let's see if we can facilitate some other examples!

About the author

Dr. Scott McLeod is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading academic experts on K-12 school technology leadership issues. As director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE) at the University of Minnesota, Dr. McLeod created and leads the only graduate program in the country based on ISTE’s National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators (NETS-A).

Much of Dr. McLeod’s latest work has focused on helping schools effectively and creatively use technology to assist with data-driven accountability initiatives. In recent years he has worked with the Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Paul public school districts; the Pennsylvania and South Carolina Departments of Education; and corporations such as Microsoft and IBM on various data-related projects. Dr. McLeod is currently working with the Minnesota Department of Education to conduct the country’s first statewide needs assessment of educators’ ability to implement effective, data-driven educational practices (www.MinnesotaDataSurveys.org). Another recent project is CASTLE’s School Data Tutorials Web site (www.SchoolDataTutorials.org), a comprehensive set of online Macromedia Flash tutorials designed to help teachers and administrators work with raw student data and create spreadsheet-based data collection templates.

Dr. McLeod can be reached at www.scottmcleod.net/contact.