Blogs & RSS as a School Communication Environment

I received quite a few comments, pingbacks, and even more e-mails regarding a recent entry, Four Reasons Why the Blogsphere Might Make a Better Professional Collaborative Environment than Discussion Forums. I’d like to present a scenario that seems like a potent intersection between the way that a school handles information, and the “new shape of information” (blogs, wikis, rss, etc.)

We have a high school, that is special in some way. We’ll say that they have a high investment in technology, training, and they serve a special population of students. I’m coming from a specific experience here. At this school, as in many, teachers are required to submit lesson plans to the administration each week. Lesson plans are frequently scanned, because the school leadership feels a need to know the day-to-day instructional culture of the school — what students are learning, and how they are learning it. The plans are then filed.

The instructional technology facilitator also collects from each teacher three lesson plans a month that the teacher has identified as a potent example of technology integration. These lesson plans are combined into the school’s intranet site for reference by all teachers.

The school obviously has an interest in going further than simply filing lesson plans away. But how might this process be automated in a way that is flexible, locally manageable (at the teacher level), and value added?

We might:

  1. Require all teachers to stop submitting lesson plans in paper, and instead, keep a daily Weblog, where they would post a succinct description of what they taught and how they did it. In addition, teachers would be required to post some reflection on the lesson’s success, and what they might have done differently. The key here is succinctness, not only for the say of writing, but also for reading.
  2. With a selected aggregator, the school leadership would capture all of the teachers’ lesson reflections and scan them appropriately for the above stated reason. They would also comment periodically with praise, suggestions, insights, and other statements, understanding that comments will be public to the rest of the schools teachers.
  3. Teachers would also be using aggregators. They would probably subscribe to, and compile the lesson blogs from all of the educators in their department. But I suspect that certain teachers are going to emerge as especially skilled at innovative/effective lessons, or at least as entertaining bloggers. The teachers would likely be subscribed to, from outside their departments.
  4. Software would also be employed that could generate dynamic RSS feeds. For instance, if a teacher is looking for insights on using spreadsheets in instruction, they might define a feed that aggregates all lessons that include the keyword, “spreadsheet”. Technorati and other blog wayports can actually do this now, but a more local and customizable solution may be advisable.
  5. With aggregators in use now, the school leadership would start using them for blog-based announcements, meeting notes, policy information, calendars, and other important information. Other special departments such as sports, theatre, music, art departments, and other school culture entities would use blogging to communicate.
  6. Some how, school leadership (and other participants) would be able to look at subscriptionship. Who’s being subscribed to? Who are school employs paying attention to? This is not specifically for professional evaluation. Instead, it would give leadership an interesting and useful picture of the school’s culture, and reveal potential pivot points among the faculty, for improving the culture in useful ways.
  7. The aggregator is the linchpin of this arrangement. Teachers must be able to refine their settings and how their subscriptions are organized. For instance, a calendar view might be useful, as teachers would like to go back to the previous year to collect information on how they taught a concept last year. Teachers would likely integrate news, web search, and social bookmark feeds into their aggregators and they would want to be able to organize them appropriately. It becomes their professional digital library.

    Comments welcome!

    2¢

19 thoughts on “Blogs & RSS as a School Communication Environment”

  1. Brilliant.

    All technologically possible now. BUT many teachers still maintain a technophobia based on a less user-friendly environment and most administrators not in computers fields still think of computers as nice typewriters.

    I’m transitioning to working this way and I’m really impressed with your vision of how it could/should work.

  2. Schools can roll all this in one neat package using Moodle.
    1. Each teacher has their own “classroom” and personal “teacher’s office”. In these areas, teachers can create curriculum guides, pacing guides, course links to online resources, lesson plans, and even eportfolios with some creative work. The next version of Moodle is slated to have Weblog modules.
    2. Selected pages in Moodle like the lesson plans can have RSS feeds enabled.
    3. Moodle currently does not have its own aggregator, but you can use your favorite and post the results as html and link that page to a web page within Moodle in the teacher’s office.
    4. Not sure about using Technorati to feed lessons related to specific goals, but I am have visited other aggregators that might have developers eager to try to do that. LearnNC for example might be able to enable RSS on their lesson plans which are correlated already, but the problem here might be the fact that the lessons do not actually change often enough to benefit from syndication. Hyper links work still make more sense until the masses of online info make the move. Hum, maybe this is what Microsoft or Yahoo or Google could do to take over all the textbook publishers?
    5. Moodle has a Global calendar, but no RSS. Events can be announced as part of course News Forums. If parents, students, admin etc are enrolled in the class, they will receive updates via email.
    6. There are some cool social bookmark tools out there that can really help in this process….but that is another blog. Great article, it made me think!!!

  3. This captures many ideas that I have been thinking of for the past month as school begins to loom in front of us.

    How about a workshop on RSS for parents. Teach them how to use the tools to save them time and keekp them informed. Show them how easy it is to blog and maybe stir up some sonversation about what their kids are doing online?

    How about every teacher having a blog, still easy to implement tech wise, perhaps not so getting the teachers to use it. Then each day teachers update the blog with the key learning concepts of the day, home work, problem solving question of the day, upcoming special events, pictures that the kids took with the digital camera of happenings in the classroom, etc. Parents will be “invited” into the learning environment of their children.

    I’ve launched a few blogs in May and June at our school and have had a very positive response from parents thus far.

  4. I think some of the educational blogging reticence is not only attributable to teachers but to districts as a whole.

    It is the same scenario – protection of children. Until there are absolutely safe blog sites that are accessible only by students and their teachers, then (for more conservative areas at least) I don’t see blogs being embraced widely, at least here in the south. I wish there was an “ePals” for blogs. If anyone knows of one, I would truly love to know about it.

    I have been investigating setting up a site for my students to use in our classroom. I have even been willing to pay for a site out of my own pocket. But bottom line, my district says no. Unless I can come up with something that is fool- (and teenager) proof, it won’t happen for us.

    Linda

  5. David I really enjoyed both this blog entry and the “four reasons.” I am attempting to facilitate an ongoing online collaboration and sharing of technology integration lessons for teachers in our county. Originally I thought of having one blog and allowing all teachers to contribute to it. But now I see the advantages of having each teacher create their own blog, and then using RSS to read each others ideas and posting comments (or questions) when needed. It’s great when tech savvy teachers can collaborate with someone in their own building, but in some cases these teachers are on their own because they are so far ahead of everyone else on staff. How awesome it would be for them to be able to connect with others and not have to “reinvent the wheel.” If you are in need of guinea pigs, sign us up!

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