My New York State School Boards Presentation

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I presented this weekend at the annual New York State School Boards conference, held at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers in Manhattan. It was a great, receptive group, although (and this happens often) a few faces were quizzical and downright skeptical. Nevertheless, there were many questions from the standing-room-only audience and I truly appreciate the interested many people have in Web 2.0 and social media.
School leaders are always a tough sell, but I’ve noticed a dramatic difference in the way everyone has become a bit more willing to suspend their disbelief about PR tools like Facebook and Twitter.
If you’d like to take a look, my presentation, Communicating in a Web 2.0 World, is available on my Slideshare page.

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Tom Gould Says, “Tame the Beast”

More from NSPRA, where I attended a workshop by Tom Gould, Public Information Officer for the Oyster Bay-East Norwich Schools on Long Island. Tom’s workshop about self-publishing online showed school PR professionals and school leaders how they can manage their own messages by using Microsoft Word or Publisher to design their own online news pages. Tom starts several stories about his District on the front page of his online District newsletter, the Observer, then uses hyperlinks to take readers to the full stories inside.
Tom also showed us videos he produces and which appear on the District website and then are loaded onto YouTube. His superintendent of schools appears in the videos, which are useful ways to discuss ongoing issues or simply to let the public know what’s coming up in the District.
I have a screenshot of Tom’s enewsletter here or you can find it online here.

I am also embedding an example of one of his District videos, in case you’d like to see how he does it.


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Help a Reporter — If He Helps You First

OK, so Peter Shankman is a handsome New Yorker with a pretty interesting blog. He writes a lot about keeping in shape, so that’s cool.

But wait — Shankman has a website, helpareporter.com. Not helpareportergethisfactsstraight.com, not helpareporterwriteasentence.com, not helpareporterwithgrammar.com, and not helpareporterfindajob.com. Now there’s an idea.

No, Shankman’s site permits PR folks (and the general public, I guess) to sign up as potential “sources” reporters can query. If you sign up, you get daily emails from Shankman, who does you the big favor of sending reporter queries your way, in case you can provide sources, names, phone numbers, ideas. I guess Shankman’s playing the buff middle man between the Great Fourth Estate and the unwashed masses of PR people. His website also warns us (because God knows we’re so out of control) not to spam reporters with unrelated, baseless attempts to get our “clients” some air time or two inches in the Business section.

Here’s my question — where’s helpaPRperson.com? I dunno, but it seems to me (I “represent” public school districts in New York) that PR people need a lot more help than journalists. I’m always wondering what’s happened to the press and where they’re all hiding. I’m always searching for a warm body with the least bit of interest in education stories. As a former journalist, I know a decent story idea when I see one or pitch one. But there’s never a reporter in sight, at least not in my neck of the woods. What’s a PR person to do? Start a blog? An ENewsletter? Use the Web to manage his own message? Now there’s an idea.

BTW — if you want to helpaPRperson, you know where to find me.

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Who Stole My Newspaper? More Insights from NSPRA

I am placing the Powerpoint presentation done at NSPRA earlier this week by Jim Van Develde of the Lakeland Schools, Lanning Taliaferro of the Harrison Schools and Stephanie Gouss of Rockland BOCES — all in my neck of the woods. It’s titled “Who Stole my Newspaper — The New Media and School Communications,” and provides some cool tips for using Web 2.0 technology in educational PR work, along with some interesting examples. You can find it here or on the NSPRA website — if you attended and know the password.

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A Few Great Websites Picked Up at NSPRA…

NSPRA’s first real day of workshops and seminars provided us with an exhausting mountain of information and tips, and without recounting everything I learned at this late hour, I will instead provide you with some of the great links that were thrown out by presenters today. I’ll have to do more in-depth summaries when I have a bit more time and I’m not out partying with the NY delegation. (Great time, by the way.)
First, check out Wendy Puriefoy’s websites at the Public Education network, including the PEN website, PEN’s Give Kids Good Schools website, and the Civic Index website she discussed in this morning’s keynote. Great reading all around and evidence that PEN is doing good work throughout the country.
I attended Tim Carroll’s skill session, “Byte Into Technology to Energize Your PR Efforts,” a fun workshop that looked at all the ways PR folks can use technology to communicate with constituents. Tim’s session examined podcasting, blogs, e-newsletters, web streaming and the dreaded database management issues we’re all tackling these days. So many things are possible. I trolled through some of his web resources, and discovered this blog done by the Mansfield Independent School District. The most recent posts were from a Mansfield delegation of educators visiting China.
By all means, check out the presentation done by Brian Woodland, APR, of the Peel District School Board in Canada. His presentation, titled “The Top 5 in 5: The Key Trends that Will Occupy You and Your District in the Next Five Years,” and most others taking place here, can be found on the NSPRA website. Mr. Woodland’s special session was informative, entertaining, and downright hilarious.

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Non-Profits and Web 2.0

A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2.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.

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How to Spend Your Summer Vacation

web-20.jpgIf you’re still not sure how to “break in” to the Web 2.0 world — through blogging, eNewsletters, social bookmarking, using online document systems or other ways — you might want to follow the advice that educational tech expert and blogger Wesley Fryer recently gave a group of teachers in a one-hour after-school staff development workshop. Realizing that many of the teachers in his audience had not heard of Web 2.0 technology and would be overwhelmed if he tried to cover it all in the time he had, Fryer suggested that they take small steps by investigating a few of Web 2.0 tools and using them “personally” over the summer. I like his suggestions, so I’m sharing them with you. If you’re a school official or a school communications professional, you might consider attacking it this way. Even if you’re a 12-month employee, summers provide most of us with time to catch up on some knowledge. (#3 and #5 are specifically geared toward teacher software, so you might want to skip those.)

1. Join a local (state) online learning community.
2. Learn about wikis and create one.
3. Create and share digital stories with VoiceThread.
4. Start using social bookmarking.
5. Join an online professional learning community like Classroom 2.0, and attend the 2007 K-12 Online Conference.
6. Share photos with family and friends on Flickr.
7. Watch and share outstanding videos online.
8. Videoconference with family and friends using Skype or iChat.
9. Create and read a customized digital “newspaper”. (With Google Reader.)
10. Learn to text message from a patient teenager.

Using Wordpress or Blogger as an eNewsletter

Hcarol-franks-randall.gifere’s a great way to communicate with your constituents, via an eNewsletter created on a blog platform. Carol Franks-Randall, Superintendent of Schools in Elmsford, NY, who’s always ahead of the curve when it comes to communicating, created a Wordpress blog, “Excellence in Elmsford,” two years ago that she now emails to community members as an eNewsletter. She has turned off the comments, making the blog her own creation over which she has total control. It’s a great way to keep in touch, control the message and even circumvent the local press by managing her own news. It’s a great idea for any school district struggling with public image or dealing with an antagonistic or absent local press.