December 2005 — Features

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Why Blog?

by Frank Catalano

His students even discussed traditionally sensitive issues, such as teen suicide, with students in Maine teacher Dave Boardman’s class. As shown in this student entry, the project created a cross-country blogging community that members didn’t want to let go:

“After school is out, will the blog still be on the Net? I mean, is it just going to shut down after June 12, or whenever the last day of school is? Are you going to keep it up and running for the random updates on students, or is this strictly a school thing, and will it only run when school is in session like next year? Just really curious because I think it would be cool to keep updated on my fellow portfolio English classmates…and the cool Californians.”
—posted on Monday, December 5, 2005 @ 4:59 pm

Communicating With Parental Units
Carrier pigeons, snail mail, or blog? Okay, the choices for communicating with parents might be more varied than that, but the reality is that, increasingly, today’s parents want daily updates on what is happening at school with homework assignments, planned field trips, etc. Yet the demands on their time often prohibit stopping by the classroom on a daily basis to chat (or, more likely, their children prohibit it when they reach the teen years). Therefore, a blog can be the right tool for reaching your school’s or district’s parents quickly.

Why blog when your school already publishes a print or e-mail newsletter? Print newsletters present their own challenges— mailing costs are high and, as we all know, students don’t seem to be the most reliable couriers for getting materials from school to home.

Today’s proliferation of spam and computer viruses has given e-mail newsletters their own set of roadblocks, as well. In a May 2005 study, the independent e-mail auditor Pivotal Veracity (www.pivotalveracity.com) requested an e-mail newsletter or marketing materials from 100 companies, and found that 59 percent were affected by “false positives” in spam filtering or were not received at all. And this is for material the sender actually requested. For these companies, opt-in e-mail was more often than not tagged as spam or simply not received. So, parents may be signing up for your school’s e-mail newsletter, but who knows if it is actually making it into their inboxes? Unlike an e-mail newsletter or a print newsletter, a blog entry is in no danger of not getting to its intended audience because it got caught in a spam filter or discarded on the walk home from school.