SchoolMatters Blog

Blogging Superintendents: The School Administrator's August 2009 cover story

I contributed a sidebar article about the positive contribution blogging can make to community engagement in the August 2009 issue of The School Administrator, published by the American Association of School Administrators.

Blogging by Board Members: Relationships and Sharing

If you are coming to this site after reading the collection of articles on blogging superintendents, welcome!  Please feel free to leave a comment or a question.

Brian Wheeler

NSBA 2008 Blogs Panel

Blogging School District Leaders: Directly Engage Your Community Using the Internet
NSBA Annual Conference, March 29, 2008

If you are interested in my two-page handout from the 2008 NSBA blogs panel, you can find it here:
http://www.wheeleronboard.com/docs/NSBA2008presentation.pdf

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Links in that document

Blog authoring software:
TypePad http://www.typepad.com
WordPress http://www.wordpress.com

Web-based RSS readers:
Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com

Primers on RSS feeds:
http://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2006/01/rss-intro
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss

Listserv or e-mail mailing list software:
Yahoo! Groups http://groups.yahoo.com/ 

Online calendars:
Trumba http://www.trumba.com
Google Calendar http://calendar.google.com

Albemarle County Public Schools Policy BG: Board-Staff Communications
http://www.wheeleronboard.com/docs/ACPS-BG_0306.pdf

Brian Wheeler

School Board bloggers to meet at national conference

I will be attending the National School Boards Association Annual Conference in Orlando during March 28th to April 1st.  There I'll be reconnecting with Craig Colgan who organized a panel on blogging at NSBA's 2006 conference.  This year joining our blogging presentation will be a School Board member who was in the audience in 2006, Jennifer Abell (Charles County, MD).  I am really looking forward to hear about Jennifer's experiences since we encouraged her to take the plunge into the blogosphere.

Four other Albemarle County School Board members will be in attendance at NSBA.  This is the single best opportunity we have for professional development as a board.  I'll also be "blogging the conference" volunteering for NSBA to summarize the workshops I attend on their conference website.

Brian Wheeler

Another School Board blogger

I am certain I have given better interviews, but it is still exciting to read in this article in Pennsylvania's Centre Daily Times that another school board member has started blogging.  A reporter in David Hutchinson's area called me when he launched his blog called For What it's Worth.  It turns out Mr. Hutchinson of the State College Area School District had been in the audience during a presentation I gave on blogging at the National School Boards Association (NSBA) annual conference in Chicago in April 2006.  I was the school board blogger on the panel, a presentation Craig Colgan and I hope to be selected to update at the 2008 NSBA conference.

Congratulations on launching your blog David!

Brian Wheeler

Encourage the Superintendent to Blog!

I was on the school division's website this afternoon and I came across an interesting survey... Superintendent Pam Moran is seeking feedback on whether the community would be interested in her starting a blog. I quickly filled it out (4 easy questions) and offered my encouragement.

Blogging has been a great communications tool for me and I think Dr. Moran would gain a large online following.  As long as there is good content, the ability to comment, and an RSS feed, I think our community would really enjoy this new source of information.

Some of you are reading this message via my e-mail newsletter SchoolMatters.  You may not yet consider yourself "bloggers."  You are not alone!  But "blog" is not a four letter word that should turn you off.  When I visit our high school classrooms and ask students if they are bloggers, nobody raises their hands.  When I ask if they use the social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, ALL the hands go up.  Like those sites, a blog is just a website that facilitates a two-way communication.  Someone posts something, you can leave a comment.  In the hands of our educational leaders like Dr. Moran, I call it community and media engagement.  I hope you will visit the survey and vote for the topics you would like Dr. Moran to address as she gets her blog up and running.

Brian Wheeler

Blogs: A new tool for engaging the public, your students, and the media

This week I am attending the Virginia School Boards Association (VSBA) annual conference in Williamsburg, VA. Today I will be a co-presenter in a seminar entitled: "Blogs: A new tool for engaging the public, your students, and the media."  Joining me is Frank Morgan, Superintendent of Goochland County Public Schools (and former Assistant Superintendent in Albemarle).

Here is how we are describing our session:

"This session will give you an opportunity to learn about blogging and how its is being used to engage the public, students, and the media.  If you thought blogs were an Internet fad you could watch from the sidelines, these presenters, a superintendent and a school board member, will make their case that blogs are an exceptional new tool for community engagement.  You will learn how blogs are shaping public opinion, student learning, the local news, and putting a bright spotlight on public education in Albemarle and Goochland."

If you happen to be a seminar participant and you visited this posting--Welcome! You are off and blogging and I hope you will add a comment or ask a question below.

Here is the handout from the seminar:
http://www.wheeleronboard.com/docs/VSBA2006presentation.pdf

Brian Wheeler

Blogmapping: Are you on the map Charlottesville?

I am a regular reader of the Poynter Online e-mail newsletters (I highly recommend them for both journalists and bloggers).  Tucked away at the bottom of a message today was an intriguing link to a site called Blogmapping.  I had never heard of it, and I couldn't resist.  If you visit, you will see I have added my blogs to the map of Charlottesville. 

The map looks kind of lonely right now, so come join me Charlottesville!  Not sure what this will get us, but it could create an interesting snapshot of our local blogging community and I am sure Waldo can say something smart about it.  Of course people now have directions to both my home and office if they don't like a posting!  Who knows, maybe it will change the location of the next impromptu blogger social hour (sorry I missed that event at Cville Coffee).

Brian Wheeler

New SchoolMatters Calendar

I just outfitted my blog and my constituent website with new calendar software offered by a company named Trumba.  I am very impressed with their program.  It offers the following cool features to people interested in my School Board calendar of activities:

• The ability to receive alerts about calendar changes
• An RSS feed of the appointments (Feed URL -- What is RSS?)
• The ability to import appointments into MS Outlook

A small version of the calendar highlights now appears on the left side of this blog.  You can click an appointment for more details or click on See all>> for eveything.

Brian Wheeler

P.S. Trumba now joins my greatest hits list of software and website gems: Plaxo, Qurb, Pandora, Bloglines, and Furl

Podcast on Blogging by School Boards and Superintendents

After I participated as a panelist at the National School Boards Association (NSBA) Annual Conference in Chicago this past Sunday, Steve Burt (also a panelist) and Tim Wilson interviewed myself, Superintendent Clayton Wilcox, and moderator Craig Colgan and created an audio podcast on the role and use of blogs by School Boards and Superintendents. You can listen to the recording here.

While attending the conference, I also was one of a dozen conference bloggers.  So I signed up to cover certain sessions and put a summary on the conference website.  Here are my postings from the conference (not sure how long these links will last):

• Getting Youth on Board
  http://boardbuzz.nsba.org/conference/archives/024544.php
  [Session on getting students on school boards]
• Dandy gets Best in Show
  http://boardbuzz.nsba.org/conference/archives/024562.php
• In AVID, they teach about life
  http://boardbuzz.nsba.org/conference/archives/024568.php
• Guidance counselors closing the gap and bringing in the cash
  http://boardbuzz.nsba.org/conference/archives/024569.php
• The good news about school safety
  http://boardbuzz.nsba.org/conference/archives/024575.php
• Can we change the odds for teachers like this?
  http://boardbuzz.nsba.org/conference/archives/024576.php
  [I only took the photo on this one, but the session was amazing and Lisa did a great summary]
• Parental involvement in the Latino community
  http://boardbuzz.nsba.org/conference/archives/024582.php
• Schools spend over $1.5 billion annually on energy inefficient designs and equipment
  http://boardbuzz.nsba.org/conference/archives/024583.php
• Conference with the Student Stars
  http://boardbuzz.nsba.org/conference/archives/024584.php

Brian Wheeler

Weblog experiment update

It is amazing to me how this weblog has really opened new communication channels to my constituents and to others I had not anticipated.  Before the weblog, my communications were either emails to my mailing list or information on my website.  Unless you were one of my almost 800 email subscribers, you probably never saw my school news items. 

With the launch of the weblog, I have found myself sending out more substantial information more regularly (by all channels).  Why?  Well a weblog makes it easy to get out a quick news item and a picture.  Also, I now often send an email with an additional link to the weblog version of the message so people can comment online.  Many more people still prefer to reply to my email, but a few constituents have started providing public feedback on the weblog.  Frankly, that was all I expected in the beginning, a few constituents chiming in with comments. 

What I didn't expect was increased attention by the news media (they want stories), that other bloggers would pick up my stories and talk about local school issues on their blogs, and that I would draw some national attention to our school division.  Waldo told me this would happen, I just didn't see it when I started last summer.  At the time he said, "I'm glad you're doing this -- it's wonderful in ways that will not be clear for some time."  Very true.

On the national front, the National School Board Association (NSBA) has invited me to come to their 2006 conference to participate in a blogging panel and they had some very nice things to say about my weblog in a posting this week.  This was an example where I posted a quick item about a Washington Post article.  In the week that followed, a good conversation started on another local weblog, a group of government students at one of our high schools wrote to ask for a meeting about the issue, a local radio station asked me to come on the air to talk about the matter, and the NSBA learned about the article and shared it on their weblog.  Good stuff. 

Now if I can just get someone podcasting our board meetings...  Brian Wheeler