Blogging to my advantage: a superintendent discovers a new tool with unlimited possibilities for two-way connection with his community.

Scene: Early one snowy morning in the central administration office of the Wawasee Community School District in northeastern Indiana.

5:51 a.m. Turned on the computer, logged onto wawasee.blogspot.com and posted the two-hour snow delay on The Wawascene, my personal weblog. Typed a sentence or two describing the current road conditions and clicked "Submit Post."

5:54 a.m. Called the traditional media outlets on my phone call list to report the delay.

6:11 a.m. Scanned the headlines of major newspapers on the Internet, cutting and pasting the URLs of two interesting education news stories into Microsoft Notepad.

6:21 a.m. Logged onto statcounter.com and noticed that the hit counter for The Wawascene had already cleared almost 1,500.

6:22 a.m. Returned to The Wawascene, posted a comment and hyperlinked to the URLs of the news stories I had noted earlier. Decided to publish the post later in the afternoon so saved it as a draft.

6:30 a.m. Started through the stack of snail mail and e-mails that had built up since yesterday afternoon.

Just another morning in the life of a blogging superintendent.

What's a Blog?

Superintendents readily understand the concept of a public flogging, but what about public blogging? What is it? Should superintendents even care?

Blog is shorthand for weblog, which is a series of items posted on the Internet for others to read. It usually includes text, images and links to other websites. Bloggers--those are the people who maintain blogs--usually update them at least daily. As a result, blogs provide a running commentary or conversation.

Although many people use blogs as online journals, detailing the events of the day and expressing their feelings about personal topics, blogging has emerged as a popular means of communication in the professional world as well, eliciting lively dialogue among people around the world.

Some days I spend 10 minutes blogging and some days I spend an hour. Sometimes I get on a roll and publish several posts in one day. I save them in "draft mode" and post them on days when I have writer's block. The time it takes to maintain a blog is more than worth it. Nothing else has allowed me to speak to thousands of people every day. It is the most time-efficient method I have found to get messages out.

I heard recently from an influential parent in a major school system on the East Coast. Frustrated with her school district's leadership and direction, she started her own blog site to alert the public to her concerns. She also uses her blogs to recruit superintendent candidates to ensure the applicant pool includes the kind of people she wants in leadership positions in her school district.

Is blogging for you? Consider this: If you don't start blogging to your patrons, they are going to start blogging about you.

Benefits of Blogging

Most superintendents struggle to find the time and the avenues to make connections with the local community. How do patrons get to know you? How do they know what you think about an issue? How do you know what they think?

Blogging is an answer. You can communicate an important date or squelch a harmful rumor. You can brag up the local football team or explain how you blew the school delay decision by not predicting the ice storm that hit two hours after your decision was made.

Blogs can make people smile, such as our popular weekly post called Friday's Funnies. There, I share humorous stories involving students or parents. Or blogs can address serious topics such as the tribute I posted about my mother on Mother's Day. The story of Barbara Stock, the widowed mother of three young children who went to college to become a teacher so she could pay the bills and feed her family, brought many readers to tears. Stories like these bring a human touch to the superintendency.

Blogging lets you reach beyond your community. I was curious about what our patrons thought about a four-day school week. So I asked! I stressed that the topic was not under active consideration, that it was a trial balloon. Not only did I hear from the community, I heard from teacher's union employees in British Columbia. They found my blog post and e-mailed me links to research about four-day school weeks.

Blogging also has a tremendous potential for connecting local patrons to the often disconnected world of state and federal politics that affect their children. Imagine the massive communication network that would span the country if every superintendent in the United States began blogging weekly to his or her faculty and community. Whenever your state legislatures issued an education bill, you could post a comment about it, link to the bill and encourage patrons to take 90 seconds and send their legislators an e-mail with their opinion. Citizens' participation in the political process could skyrocket.

Taking Risks

Blogging involves risks as well. Many superintendents' primary fear is that patrons will leave anonymous negative comments on the blog site. In my experience, almost all negative comments are quickly followed by someone with a positive or neutral statement.

An anonymous Wawascene poster claiming to be a gay student at the high school was openly critical of the school administration's view of gays. Through the blog, the poster was encouraged by others to talk directly with administrators about his concerns. Others posted comments stating they had not shared his negative experiences.

As the moderator, you can turn the comments on or off, or you can allow only registered users to comment. In some cases you can require that all comments be approved by you or someone else before they are posted. Of course then you may be accused of censoring people and only approving positive comments. Never underestimate the benefit of "putting yourself out on a public limb." The public is likely to admire and respect your courage to do so. I allow all comments.

In our school district, posing issues, opinions and ideas for people to reflect on is considered a positive thing. However, in some districts this could be a source of tension between board members and superintendents, especially if a superintendent posts content that might not represent the school board's views. To address that concern, our board president asked me in a public board meeting to put a statement on the site that reminds readers that my views do not necessarily represent the school system or board members individually or collectively.

A note of caution: Realize your blog is a permanent written record that you are posting for the whole world to read. Although you can delete your entire blog and blog site, you will never know if people have printed your postings and kept them.

Making Connections

Think of a blog site as an eclectic combination of electronic newsletter, public relations strategy, editorial forum and personal soapbox. I get most of my blog topics from state and national education publications, e-mail updates from state superintendent and school board organizations and from the state's leading Internet news organizations. With just a few mouse clicks, I can link editorial content with actual databases and research articles to demonstrate or explain to patrons how a local issue is similar to or different from a state or national issue.

For example, when local property taxes were a big issue (and when aren't they?), I explained to our patrons through my blogs how their property tax bill increased but our school district's funding did not. By sharing the information over several days and weeks, I was able to clear up some misperceptions about the relationships between school funding and local property tax rates. Consequently, I didn't have to spend hours putting together a presentation about property taxes for the public school board meeting, only to have a patron complain about the athletic coach and trump the next day's headlines.

Several journalists have told me they regularly monitor The Wawascene to identify educational issues. I once wrote a blog post titled "Another Big Fat Mandate" detailing proposed Indiana legislation that would require each school to weigh and measure every student and submit the data to the state department of education. After reading the blog, an Indiana journalist contacted me to discuss the mandates that have burdened public education.

Giving Voice

Regardless of the popularity of blogging, state and national education organizations seem skeptical about its benefits. I am sure the mental picture of hundreds of people blogging away, unrestrained, to hundreds of thousands of patrons might keep the executive director of a statewide lobbying organization up at night. After all, who controls the message?

But this is precisely the point. Blogging gives everyone a voice. It is time for mainline education organizations to sit up and take notice. It is a new world. Anyone can start a blog site tonight and get his or her message out. Whoever gets there first and gets the message out will be heard.

Remember when you used to carve your initials in the tree with your pocket knife? In today's world, your children and grandchildren are leaving their marks electronically. They post a website or blog about their daily lives and invite in anyone who might care to listen. They are saying to the world, "I am here and this is what I have to say."

Administrators can be proactive and build their blogging networks to get their messages directly to the people, or they can spend their time reacting to messages about us. Remember, in the communication void, patrons will fill the gaps.

Getting Started

Technology and blogging software have gotten so user-friendly that technophobia is no longer an excuse for no longer getting started. You're over that now. Remember, it was only 15 years ago when you stood in absolute amazement and watched a big box slowly spit out an exact copy of a paper transmitted over your phone line. You had no idea how that paper squeezed through the phone line. You probably thought the fax machine was the pinnacle of communication technology.

Now you can add blogging to your communication toolkit and blog to your advantage. If you can't beat 'em, you may need to join 'em.

Mark Stock is superintendent of the Wawasee Community School Corporation, 1 Warrior Path, Bldg. 2, Syracuse, IN 46567. E-mail [e-mail]

Practical Tips for Novice Bloggers

Mark Stock, who has been maintaining a blog as a community superintendent since February 2005, has suggestions for other school leaders who decide this would be a good communications tool in their own districts.

1. Keep your posts short.

2. Post frequently--daily if possible.

3. Provide hyperlinks to other news stories and data.

4. Post a variety of content, including newsletter-type information, positive developments in the district, practical matters such as snow delays and bomb threat explanations and editorial content.

5. Show your sense of humor.

6. Blog by committee if you're too busy to do so yourself, and give other administrators posting rights to your blog.

Ready to jump in? Go to www.blogger.com or any other free blogging service and you can be blogging in 30 minutes. The software has become so user-friendly that with just a little help from your technology person you can be up and going.

The ABCs of Blogging

II you want to understand and speak the lingo of the blogosphere, this vocabulary list might be a good place to begin. The words and definitions were compiled by education blogger EdWonk www.educationwonk.blogspot.com.

Blog: This is a contraction of the word weblog. Usually, blogs consist of a series of entries, (called posts) presented in reverse chronological order. Blogs are usually written by an individual or a small group.

Blogger.com: The largest provider of free blogging services. Noted for its ease of use, Blogger.com is a subsidiary of Google.

Blogosphere: All blogs taken together as a group or community.

Blogroll: A blogroll is a collection of links to other blogs. Usually it's found in a blog's sidebar.

Blogswarm: The blogswarm occurs when a large number of blogs publish posts that target (or praise) an individual, organization or other blog or group of blogs.

Commenter: One who participates in the online discussion among readers at a blog's individual post.

Edublog: This is a blog that primarily concerns itself with education-related issues.

EduSphere: The community of edublogs taken together as a whole.

Flame: Both a verb and a noun, these are extremely insulting or provocative remarks either published by a blog's author or among a blogs commenters.

Lurker: These are regular readers of a particular blog who do not comment. They may make their presence known if they find a particular post to be sufficiently provocative through commenting or e-mailing the blogger.

MSM: The traditional mainstream media.

Post: This is both a noun and a verb. A post is a weblog entry. To post is the act of publishing a blog's entry.

Sidebar: Most blog pages will have two or three columns. The sidebar(s) are those columns to the side that usually feature blogrolls, archive access, hit counters, and other features.

Sitemeter: A proprietary technology that many bloggers use to record the number of visitors and page-views over a given amount of time.

Splog: A blog whose contents are essentially advertisements for business or Internet scares. Posts feature advertising as content. The splog's owner may leave comments at other sites for the purpose of driving traffic to the splog.

Troll: An individual who uses a blog's commenting feature to launch personal attacks upon the blogger or another commenter.

Wiki: This is Internet software that allows a number of contributors to add and edit entries. Blogs differ from wikis in the number of users who have access, as well as the degree of editorial control.