The Blogging Life: 16 Months and 87 Countries Later

This blog has been around for 16 months, so it’s time to take stock. Some posts have been better than others, admittedly, and there have been dry periods, when other projects have distracted me from blogging for weeks. But I’m stickin’ to it until I literally run out of words.
Since I’m taking stock, I’ll be egotistic for a moment and share a few amazing facts about my readership. One of my favorite analytic tools is FlagCounter, which you can see in the right-hand margin of my blog. Flag Counter, among other things, tells you from where in the world your readers have visited.

School Communications 2.0 has received:

1,782 visits from the United States (I’m going to assume that 100 of those visits were from the author)

290 visits from the Philippines

243 visits from Canada

169 visits from the United Kingdom

141 visits from India

107 visits from Malaysia (who knew?)

77 visits from the Netherlands

66 visits from Australia

And the list goes on, with a good number of visits from countries in Europe, as you might expect. But it’s when the numbers begin to dwindle down to single visits that I’m reminded how awed by the Web I continue to be. Here are just a few of the visits that fascinate me:

4 visits each from Jordan, Vietnam, and Kenya

2 visits each from Croatia, Moldova and Oman

1 visit each from Mongolia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Islamic Republic of Iran, Kazakhstan and Morocco.

And finally, on March 27, I received a single visit from the Holy See (Vatican City State).

My guess is that someone at the Vatican stopped by to read my post about the Pope’s YouTube page. Perhaps the Official Papal Social Media Guy. Whatever. The point is, he stopped by.

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Immaculate Reception — Vatican Goes Video

VATICAN CITY, VATICAN - JANUARY 08: Pope Bene...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

OK, so maybe I shouldn’t be sacriligious about this.

But you have to admit, it’s pretty Web 2.0-cool when the Vatican launches its own YouTube channel, and that’s exactly what happened on Friday. Pope Benedict XVI joined President Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth II in launching his own channel, the latest effort by the folks in Rome to reach out to the digital generation. (It probably won’t work on my college-age kids, however.)

At a Vatican news conference, an executive of Google Inc., parent company of YouTube, joined with the Catholic clergy to announce that the Vatican had posted its first 12 videos on the pope’s new YouTube channel. The Church hopes to publish three new videos each day.

“This is in particular directed towards the young, but not exclusively,” said Father Federico Lombardi, director of the press office of the Holy See. “This is a step toward better communication. The pope encouraged us to adopt new ways of communication in order to reach out to the people who are interested in the pope’s message.”

Initially, the new YouTube channel will post videos in four languages — Italian, English, German and Spanish — and more languages will be added later.

Way to go, Ben!

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Learn How to Elect a President

Common Craft has done it again, producing a simple and amusing how-to video, this time on how we elect U.S. presidents. Common Craft, an ingenious company started by Sachi and Lee Lefever of Seattle, Wash., produces videos (public and available on YouTube and other video sites, and enhanced versions for corporate use) about somewhat complex topics in a simple-to-understand way. Using narration, paper cut-outs and animation, Common Craft videos include “RSS in Plain English,” “Twitter in Plain English,” “Wikis in Plain English,” and more. They’re fun to watch and easy to digest, and I often use them in my Web 2.0 workshops.
Their latest entry is “Electing a U.S. President in Plain English,” a must for anyone still confused by our popular vote vs. electoral system of electing a President. I can tell you it helped me, and this might be the perfect teachable moment for anyone — adults, kids, first-time voters.

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Using Video to Support Public Ed

The latest video to hit YouTube for a good cause — to shock people out of complacency long enough to do something about the downward trend in U.S. public education — is ED in 08’s video, now on YouTube and viewed (at this point) more than 400,000 times.

The video points out that in 2002, UNICEF compared public education in 24 nations around the world, and the U.S. ranked 18 out of the 24 nations.  EDin08 is the communications effort of Strong American Schools, a nonpartisan campaign supported by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to promote sound U.S. education policies.  The organization does not support a particular presidential candidate, but urges the public to “demand that every presidential candidate has a plan to improve America’s schools.”

Here are some of the disturbing statistics you can find on their website:

1.2 million students drop out of high school every year
1/4 high school students don’t graduate on time
2/3 jobs require college education
70% of 8th graders can’t read at grade level
93% of American science teachers have little or no training in science

While the Strong American Schools website has some cool tools that parents and educators can use to educate their children, network with others, and so on, I really like the YouTube campaign. It’s effective, and the videos ought to be used at every education conference out there.

Here’s their latest example:

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Tech TV

I was just rooting around YouTube the other day, searching for decent high school news shows I’d intended to promote here as a way to highlight how technology has come so far in the 21st century. Much to my chagrin, a lot of what I viewed on YouTube was either two years old (or older), and looked it, or was fairly pedestrian and not clearly connected to the school itself.

Coincidentally, eSchoolNews sent out an email this morning announcing that it has launched a new video news network, Student Video Network, which will provide students interested in video production with information on the most popular and relevant educational technology stories in the news.  Participating schools can then shoot a script based on the stories and choose to integrate graphics and photos into the news report.

“This is a real-world application of the technology skills they’re learning in school,” said Tom Lapping, president and CEO of JDL Horizons–the company hosting eSN’s Student Video Network. “It will be good for school exposure, but also for students who could use this material as part of their college admissions or eventual job application.”

So far, I only see two high schools with videos on the site, but the quality is top-notch and the subject matter (gaming to school assessment information) timely. The videos don’t seem to be embeddable at the moment, but they will hopefully move in that direction.

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Lessons Learned: The Gustav Information Center

A lesson for your classes this week — the power of the Internet during a crisis or catastrophe.  The latest example of how the Web joins in to get vital information out is the Gustav Information Center, a wiki created on Ning by Andy Carvin. This wiki, which I joined (see my widget at the bottom of my sidebar), is providing news updates, weather maps, photos, forums and videos. Teams of people are working on getting the word out to families, pet owners and others on a minute-by-minute basis.

It would be a great class lesson to examine the online efforts of individuals and groups to get the message out instantaneously during events like hurricanes, tornados, natural disasters or large-scale violence.

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Textbooks and iPods and Facebook — Oh My!

This Special Report in Businessweek this week takes a fascinating look at how technology — from iPods to professors’ Facebook pages — is changing the face of your average campus.

I especially like this quote from a researcher in the story:

Cara Lane, a researcher who studies learning and scholarly technologies at the University of Washington in Seattle, says all that time spent searching for Hannah Montana videos on YouTube can help make teens better at searching the databases, including Lexis-Nexis and J-Stor, they’ll need for academic research—those IMs, texts, and status updates are a primer for participation in online forums related to classwork. “Students usually arrive not knowing how to use education-oriented technology tools,” Lane says. “But they quickly surpass their instructors in their ability to use them effectively.”

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A Back-to-School Wakeup Call

I am a major fan of Dr. Michael Wesch, professor of digital ethnography at Kansas State University, best known for his video, The Machine is Using/Us, which went viral on YouTube.
Because I just dropped off my two college students for another year of learning, and because the public school year is about to begin here in New York, I thought I’d provide this gift to you of another Wesch video, which serves to remind us who our students are. The video was made after 200 students collaborated on the topic: “A Vision of Students Today.” Enjoy — it’s an eye-opener.

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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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Catch the Train Before it Leaves the Station

If you’re a school official reluctant to enter the Internet’s Web 2.0 revolution, perhaps this video by Professor Mike Wesch of Kansas State University will persuade you to climb onto this train before it’s too late.