December 2005 — Features

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Why Blog?

by Frank Catalano

The Organization/Blog/Educator Connection
Companies serving the education community are using blogs to provide educators with information that supports teaching and learning. For instance, education companies have developed blogs that discuss topics of interest such as testing and assessment, or differentiated instruction. The first blog I helped develop for Pearson Education (www.pearson.com), TrueScores (www.truescores.com), is one example of a way that scientists and other education professionals within a company are sharing their views and research with the greater education community.

Professional organizations and associations are also using blogs to reach out to their members and the greater community. For example, the International Reading Association (www.reading.org) publishes “Reading Today Daily” with news from the world of literacy at blog.reading.org.
—posted on Saturday, December 10, 2005 @ 4:59 pm

Rules to Blog By
If you decide that blogs will help your school meet its communications or instructional goals, or both, there are three rules to blog by:

  1. Blogs take time. If a school is going to use a blog to communicate with parents, or if teachers opt to blog in order to keep in contact with students, or any combination of the above, expect to expend effort. Blogging is writing, and good writing takes time—sometimes a significant amount of time. You will want the information to be timely, accurate, and, of course, well-written. And don’t forget that timely part. Since most blogs are organized with date and time stamps in reverse chronological order (unlike this faux blog, which, for the sake of not having you start at the end, takes creative license), going too long without a blog entry can make a reader wonder if the blog really is providing the most upto- date information—or if it, like many personal Web pages were in the early days of the World Wide Web, has been abandoned.
  2. Blogs are very public. Because blogs (unless they’re posted on an internal server or are password-protected) are on the open Internet, pretty much anyone can read them. Think of blogging as a kind of public speech: So, don’t post something you wouldn’t want a student’s parent to read, or something you don’t want to see online in perpetuity. Even though blog entries can easily be changed, sometimes they can’t as easily be completely deleted. Thus, odds are they, like any Web page, may live forever in Google’s (or someone else’s) cache.
  3. Blogs are not a new medium. “New mechanism” is a better phrase. The medium is the Internet (or, more specifically, the Web page). The mechanism is a blog authoring tool. Very useful, very cool, and very ubiquitous (unless your server goes down). But blogs are not the new papyrus. They’re a new digital way of inscribing that same papyrus. And the inscriptions commonly are words, though there are also a growing number of video and audio blogs (think podcasting).
    —posted on Sunday, December 11, 2005 @ 2:15 am