Paper or Digital?
For as long as I’ve been doing PR work for school districts, people have asked me whether they should publish on paper or digitally. And that question comes up more frequently now, of course. All you have to do is watch the newspaper business in this nation to understand how important it is to evolve. The nation is rapidly going digital, and if you’re not keeping up, you’re falling behind.
Nevertheless, I still meet many people in the course of my life who buy their local newspaper at the same deli or newsstand that’s served them for the last 30 years, people who don’t know very much about the Internet, and still more people (even colleagues) who say that if it’s not on paper, they’re not going to see it. Yikes!
So if you’re a school official still struggling with the paper vs. digital divide, you might be able to satisfy all your constituents — parents, students, community members, senior citizens — by offering them news from your school district both ways. It’s Web 2.0, folks, and so many free content creation websites exist that you can create a digital newsletter in very little time, shoot it out to the public via email, and still print (but maybe a smaller print run?) a traditional newsletter.
I recently gave a few such Web 2.0 tools a test run, and found one I like from Letterpop, a newsletter creation website that provides you with tons of potential templates, allows you to load photos, write captions, produce a multi-page newsletter. When you’re done, you can simply publish the newsletter and provide constituents with the URL. Voila.
At the moment, I’m using Letterpop to create an online tip sheet that I’m using as a speaker at the National School Public Relations Assocation conference in July. The tip sheet needs to be one page and my topic is: “School PR and Social Media.” So I’m definitely not giving everyone a paper handout (although the conference organizers are). As an alternative, I’m providing everyone with an online tip sheet, complete with built-in links.
Here’s what my tip sheet looks like so far. When it’s done, I’ll provide a link.
MySpace and the Principal
Mark Walsh over a
t EdWeek’s School Law Blog reported recently that an Indiana Supreme Court has thrown out a case involving a middle school student who posted a tirade against her principal on none other than the social networking site MySpace. The student was charged with harassment for messages she aimed at Greencastle Middle School Principal Shawn Gobert, after a dispute about body piercings. The student also allegedly set up a fake MySpace “group” that included vulgarities and Gobert’s name in the title.
Before getting to the state supreme court, the case was heard by an Indiana trial court, which found the student delinquent on the harassment charges. But then the state appeals court reversed that decision, ruling that the student was protected by the First Amendment.
In its decision on May 13, the state supreme court ruled in favor of the student, but on the basis that the fake MySpace page had never authorized the principal to be one of its viewers. The court also cited Indiana’s harassment statute, which states that a person breaks the law only when they communicate a message with “the intent to harass, annoy, or alarm another person but with no intent of legitimate communication.”
The student’s postings showed that she clearly wanted to communicate her anger and criticism about the principal’s disciplinary action, the court said, and “merely intended to amuse and gain approval or notoriety from her friends, and/or to generally vent anger for her personal grievances.”
An interesting case that raises all kinds of questions about the First Amendment, the Internet and social networking sites that are still primarily populated by teens.
If you want to read about a fascinating case with similar overtones, check out the New York Magazine’s controversial examination, “Testing Horace Mann,” from its March 30 issue. It’s a disturbing look at the way students used FaceBook, but an even more disturbing examination of the adults involved in the scandal.
An Inspiring Message for Teachers
I just have to share this video with you, which I discovered in a roundabout way — reading Valhalla computer teacher Jennifer Cronk’s blog and finding a link to the video. It will help you to remember why you went into education and that test scores should not be our only focus.
One Sentence…
I discovered another great example of Web 2.0 user-generated content — One Sentence. This site makes you think, use your brain cells, and have fun with writing. The point is to tell a complete story in one sentence.
Here’s what the website About Us page says:
One Sentence is an experiment in brevity. Most of the best stories that we tell from our lives have one really, really good part that make the rest of the boring story worth it.
This is about that one line.
This is about telling the most interesting or poignant story possible in the least amount of words.
This is about small bite-sized pieces of extraordinary lives and ordinary lives alike… the happy, the sad, the funny, the depressing.Not all the one-liners are great, and some are heartbreakingly bad, but there are some gems.
- Even though it was lodged somewhere in the bowels of the toilet, we could still hear it chirping.
- My neighbor just found out that I get dressed with the blinds open.
- Her mother knew.
- Today I’ve identified 15 objects on my desk that could kill a person.
- It was one of those exams that you absolutely must pass if you want to continue in the program, and I failed the set-your-alarm-clock-properly portion.
I think it would be great to have our own One Sentence contest. Let me think about this…
Using Google Docs
We have been using Google Docs in my office recently, particularly because my staff and I all write a gazillion profiles of individuals retiring from our organization, in preparation for our annual Retirement Reception. It’s a great tool because it keeps me up-to-date on everyone’s progress, and permits me to easily go in at any time to edit or write profiles. My secretary, the hard-working and intelligent Doreen, also can keep track.
Creating and storing your documents (this includes docs that work and look just like MS Word, Powerpoint and Excel files) on Google Docs means they’re stored online. That also means they can’t be deleted from your hard drive and that you can open them from any computer. No more flash drives, CDs for storage, or losing all your documents when you get a computer virus or when your computer goes kaput. Everything in Google Docs is secure and password-protected, but you also can invite “collaborators” (people who can edit and open your documents) or “viewers” (those who can only read them).
Here’s what Melinda Miller of Willard, Mo., an elementary school principal and author of The Principal Blog, says about her use of Google Docs:
* I started downloading everything that came as an attachment into google docs first and then save it also in whatever file I needed to. Other principals in my district and I send official documents back and forth for editing but they haven’t bought into google docs yet.
* PTO Notes – I type up monthly PTO notes for my PTO meetings regardless of whether I can be there or not. Instead of posting these in the teachers lounge or making a copy for each teacher, I “publish” the notes and then send a link to the teachers to read. I could still post one copy in the work room but I forget.
* End of the year checklist – Instead of giving all the teachers a copy of the end of the year checklist to lose, I just downloaded it to google docs, “published” it, and then sent them a link. I really just want them to have a copy to refer to and then I will give them a final copy but this is better than copying a lot of times. They can just refer to it until closer to the end of the year.
* End of year info – The end of the year comes at us so fast that I thought I would also type up some “helpful info” and send it as a document as well. This one is a work in progress and I told them that I would be adding to it and not to make a bunch of copies but to just save the link and refer back to it. (I don’t think they have even explored delicious yet.)Try using Google Docs. Go to docs.google.com and open a free account and just start. It’s worth it and I can almost guarantee that it will save your sanity. Once you’ve mastered using it, sign up your colleagues. It’s an efficient way to share and communicate. If you’re still a bit reluctant, take the Google Docs tour first.
Non-Profits and Web 2.0
Image via Wikipedia
Should you blog? Should you promote, social bookmark, or join networking sites? This seems to be the big question facing educators who remain reluctant to launch a blog, an eNewsletter or promote the good works of their school districts via social networking sites like Digg or Delicious. It might help to look around for a few posts at the online world of non-profits that post, blog, network, and promote. Squidoo has an interesting list of “The 59 Smarts Orgs Online” that anyone taking his first step into the scary world of public blogging, newslettering or promoting should read. Included on the list are some inspiring websites from Share Our Strength, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, The One Campaign, and World Changing. Many of these organizations have learned that the best way to communicate in the 21st century is via the Web, and specifically Web 2.0 — interactive, user-generated websites. If these organizations can reach out and communicate this way, shouldn’t schools and school officials at least make a similar attempt? Let me know what you think.
Happy Mother’s Day
I can think of no better Mother’s Day gift than this, by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Have a great day!
Teens Improve Their Writing When They Blog
This is fascinating to someone who is a writing “semi-purist,” like myself.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently explored the link between formal writing and the writing that teens do when they email one another, text each other and write for the Internet. What they found was that blogging is helping teens become more prolific writers. Hurray!
I know this is true of my own son, who maintains his own blog, maintains a Facebook account and yes – writes for the college newspaper. All of that spells one thing – plenty of practice.
The April 24 survey showed that 47 percent of teen bloggers write outside of school several times a week or more, compared to 33 percent of teens who don’t maintain blogs. More than half of both groups, although the number is higher for bloggers, believe that writing is important to their success in life.Duke University writing professor Bradley Hammer told eSchool News that blog writing can be better than the writing style students learn in school, or SAT-style writing.
“In real ways, blogging and other forms of virtual debate actually foster the very types of intellectual exchange, analysis, and argumentative writing that universities value,” he wrote in an op-ed piece last August.
The full report is available on the Pew Internet site.
More Reading:
Using iGoogle to Start Your Day
If you don’t have iGoogle set up on your computer, then you might as well start your day an hour later than everyone else. As school communicators and school superintendents, it’s important to get off on the right foot. I will likely spend the new few blog entries showing you how to set up iGoogle as user-designed news and blog feed repository, or in non-geek speak, an easy to use place to store all your favorite websites and blogs. What’s more iGoogle has such an easy user interface you’ll find it a breeze to set up. Stay tuned and I will show you how to accomplish all this in my next post.
I Like This Blog…
I like this blog
maintained by Woodbury, N.J., Superintendent of Schools Joseph Jones, an honest effort to keep constituents, community members and parents up to speed on what that District is doing. It really is a solid blog, with many posts noted in its archive (in the right-hand column) and lots of variety. There’s testing information, great kids, and generally news-worthy and helpful information. Superintendent Jones manages to do what many blog owners have a tough time doing — making entries on a regular basis. This is the key to a successful blog and the only thing that will breathe life into it. I’ve looked around at dozens of school blogs and have noted that some have no entries since September. It was a good idea at the time, wasn’t it? It’s hard when life gets in the way, but posting to a blog can take less than 30 minutes, and perhaps another 15 minutes linking it to social bookmarking sites.
