Moving to a Staff Blog

In August, I went cold-turkey and informed my teachers that I would not be sending mass emails this year. I briefly touched on how inefficient email is as a one-to-many communication tool and most nodded along as they’ve all fallen victim to the “TMI” of a colleague who uses “reply all” to share that they wouldn’t make the faculty meeting because they’d been having stomach cramps all day.

As with the introduction of anything completely new, I explained to them the trade-off I was willing to make. My school was functioning under an intense “culture of meetings” that, in my opinion, was a little excessive. I committed to them to cut down on meeting times, but the trade-off was that all “FYI” items — without exception — would be posted on a private staff blog and that they were responsible for checking it every day.

Knowing that there would still be some for whom this was uncomfortable, I enabled a “subscribe by email” button at the top of the page. This meant that it was up to each individual to subscribe if they wanted to continue to receive school news via email. For me, this meant that I still only had to post in one place.

As a last bit of insurance, I worked with our school technologist to ensure that our staff blog was the browser start-up page on teacher computers. This means that it’s staring them in the face every time they open their browsers.

The benefits of the staff blog as I have seen them unfold this year are:

  • Information is archived. How many emails do you get from staff who absent-mindedly deleted that email with the attachment they needed? I’ve been guilty of this myself! On the blog, everything is categorized and archived by month so the assembly schedule we used in October is still there when we need it again in January.

  • Information is searchable. Technically, email is searchable, too, but if you’ve ever used FirstClass as your email client you’ll know that this is less than ideal. Plus, with the small mailbox sizes we are allocated, and the wonky way FC duplicates emails when you reply or forward, people tend to delete stuff.

  • Comments are way more efficient than emailing. This one was a bit unexpected, but it’s probably the biggest benefit. Say you post about an upcoming event and you omit an important piece of information. If you had emailed it, you’d get 10 or 15 emails asking for clarification and you’d have to either reply to each one or send one of those, “Oops! I’m sorry I forgot to tell you that Friday’s dance has an 80s theme…” emails. On the blog, one person asks the question in the comments and I can answer it once,

Overall, I think this has been a successful experiment. I think one of the primary reasons is that I articulated the purpose clearly as a reduction in wasted meeting time. Also, the cold-turkey approach was the only way to go. I don’t think this would have worked as effectively had I continued to send emails and post on the blog.

It didn’t take long for the hold-outs to come around when there was something they didn’t know about. I overheard more than one conversation along the lines of, “How did you know about [whatever]?”

“It was posted on the blog yesterday. Don’t you check it?”

Also, as with the team blogs, support is critical. This was new for people so hand-holding was critical for some while some were off and running right away. Some people stress out very easily because they “just aren’t good with technology” so it’s critical to support them in the early stages.

At this point in the year, there are four of us who have rights to post on the staff blog. I want to expand this next year to make it even more collaborative and to reinforce it as the “one-stop shop” for all things school related.

38 thoughts on “Moving to a Staff Blog”

  1. Megan

    Hi Scott, I love how your posts detail not just the technical parts of how you set up new ways of doing things but also the process of getting your staff on board. I think you do a really good job of thinking of solutions to problems before they come up.
    I’ve really enjoyed visiting your blog. I’ll be posting my comments about your most recent posts on my blog as part of an assignment for Dr. Strange’s EDM 310 class

    1. Scott Post author

      Hi Megan -

      Thanks for your comment. I think it’s important not to just “do technology” because it’s cool. There needs to be some kind of real benefit, and people need to see the payoff.

      Have a great semester!

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  3. Paul Hawking

    Hi Scott,

    This is just absolutely brilliant! Your IT staff must be delighted as well at the space saved on your mail server, not having to nag the staff as often to delete emails before the server reaches capacity, etc.

    I would love to see professional learning communities (PLC’s) and departments coordinate their communications via blogs as well: perhaps having the staff open up Google Reader each morning for the latest school feeds.

    1. Scott Post author

      Hi Paul -

      Thanks for your reply! Turning folks on to Google Reader might be a bit more of a challenge as it would require a bit more hand-holding as well as some background in RSS, but I agree that it has some potential to pull in multiple resources to one place.

  4. Philip Cummings

    Scott, this is great. I appreciate your sharing the details of how you went about the move to a blog and what the benefits have been. I’m curious whether your faculty has also see the benefits. Have you seen more teachers becoming interested in blogging or even using a class blog to share with parents? Thanks again for sharing.

  5. Mr. Arakaki

    This is what I’ve been waiting for!!! I’ve got some technical questions:

    • When staff launch their web browser, does it default to the staff blog page or does it default to the WP Dashboard for the staff blog?

    • Does each staff member have their own unique login/pass for the staff news blog?

    • How did you select the other ‘authors’ for the staff blog for this year?

    1. Scott Post author

      Hey Layne -

      (1) As long as they’ve checked the “Remember me” box the first time they log into WP, it’ll go right to the staff blog.

      (2) I batch created a unique login for every staff member using an export from Infinite Campus and the Import Users plug-in I wrote about in my last post.

      (3) There was no formal process for selecting authors. If a teacher came to me more than twice with something to post, I’d say, “How about I make you an author?” Right now it’s my AP, my Instructional Coach, one of my team leaders, and me. I’d love to have more.

      Shoot me an email and we can arrange a time for you to stop by and I’ll walk you through.

  6. Rick

    This is outstanding, Scott. Also, don’t forget that Outlook also doubles as a feed reader, although it wouldn’t include the valuable comments that would be generated. A quick staff teach-to should be all it takes to show them how to throw a feed into Outlook without subscribe-by-email.

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  8. Rachael

    Thanks for walking us through this. Beats the random memo system and allows the kind of inclusiveness / responsiveness which facilitates a negotiated, collaborative outcome – an outcome owned by all participants!

    1. Scott Post author

      Hi Chris -

      Although I don’t post anything that would be considered “confidential,” the blog is private. I use a plugin called More Privacy Options that allows me to make the blog private for community members. Since all staff are already community members for the purposes of posting on their team blogs, this works well.

      I have a top-level domain that is myschool.org. Just like all of my teams have directories like myschool.org/team, the staff blog is at myschool.org/staff. With a WP 3.0 install configured for multiple sites, when a user logs in to myschool.org, they have rights to post on their own blog and read the staff blog.

      Does that make any sense? I spent a lot of time chewing on this over the summer with help from Tim Lauer. He was talking about doing something similar.

      As far as tech support, I trained team leaders on how to access the blog and have my technologist on-call as well. The need for help and support has really been minimal since the first week or two this year.

  10. Chris Craft

    Hi Scott,

    Thanks. I think this might be the source of pushback for my folks. We have a school blog that some folks access, but it’s a blogger blog that is restricted to us. I suspect our folks might have issues logging in/accessing, etc.

    We don’t have a team blog initiative or anything.

    Perhaps in the future.

    Great work on this idea!

    Chris

  11. Neil Stephenson

    We did something similar with our staff meetings – we moved all the minutia that often takes up staff meeting (dates for events, forms to hand out, times for flu vaccinations, etc) and moved it to a collaborative Google Doc. The expectation is that all teachers read (and add relevant content) to the Doc. This has shaved 30-45mins off our staff meetings – time we use for more productive discussions related to teaching and learning.

    1. Scott Post author

      Hi Neil -

      I like that idea a lot. I do something similar with our Leadership Team agendas. Although I stop short of allowing teachers to add their own agenda items to the Doc itself, I post the Doc to the staff blog and they have input through the comments there.

      Thanks for reading.

      • Scott

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  14. Jason Luebke

    I have also created a secure staff blog, but have not moved to this as the ONLY form of electronic email. However, I like the idea of it. Thanks for your insight!

    1. Scott Post author

      Jason -

      Thanks for reading. That’s why I went cold-turkey. This experiment would never have worked if staff could “choose” to read the blog or ignore it. It had to be the “one-stop shop” for administrivia.

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  16. Michelle Baldwin

    Great idea to go cold turkey… love that the “hold outs” experienced a little awakening to get them on board.

    Because the staff members aren’t contributing to the publishing end, I could see this as a lot more palatable by most. Would be interesting to see the same scenario in a wiki or some other collaborative site (not just a GDoc) where all staff could contribute- or not- to publishing.

    Wish my school would go this route! I’m buried in emails.

  17. Cindy

    Great idea – wish more administrators would do this!! so much time is wasted and we usually have our meetings on Mondays and people are draggin!!! As for Skype – our district blocks it too – so I got creative and found this one that isn’t blocked (hahahaha!!) http://tinychat.com/ – very easy to use!

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  19. Tim Lauer

    Nice work Scott.

    Chris asked about the seperate sites. Our Staff Bulletin blog is a separate install of WordPress only available to staff. We have been using a private staff space for a few years. I really don’t care for email for all the reasons that Scott outlined. Also having the ability to search and also the archive make this approach very attractive.

    Nice job.

    Tim

    1. Scott Post author

      I was fortunate that WP3.0 came out as I was working through this. It’s much simpler having multiple blogs under the same install. The plugin I mentioned a few comments earlier makes it simple to make one blog private.

      Another benefit of multiple blogs under one install, of course, is that teachers only have one login to remember.

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  21. Rick

    Outlook? That may be worse than FirstClass…

    Sorry, I forgot I was commenting on a blog by an Apple guy. For better or worse, many of us use that in the workplace because it’s provided by our districts and integrated into our calendars, SharePoint pages, etc…

  22. John McCombs

    Great ideas! I’ve been posting my morning announcements on my blog so that just in case I’m off campus and am not there to announce on the PA, the blog is there for the teachers to read to their own classes. Parents can read morning announcements too….There is a great deal of overlap in what I need to send to the students and what I need to tell the teachers.

  23. Alexis

    Thanks! I blog occasionally for my junior high instruction. I have passed on this great advice to my principal.

  25. Andrea earl

    This is an awesome idea. I am so sick of resending e-mails to staff members that can’t find them later. Now if I can just get the rest of my admin on board.

    1. Scott Post author

      Hi Patti – Thanks for asking.

      A blog is really the best of the three for one (or few)-to-many communication of stuff that’s “news-like.”

      We use a wiki for our staff handbook. It’s relatively static, but now easy to update when needed and it saves paper.

      As far as a Ning, I didn’t really see it as the solution to any problem that I had.

  27. Paige Ellis

    Hi Scott!

    I was lead to your blog by my EDM310 professor, Dr. Strange, and I am so glad that I was! Not only have I enjoyed your post, I have also obtained valuable insight and information. Thanks!

    In this post you made excellent points on why a staff blog surpasses e-mail when it comes to mass communication. The way that you implemented it was bold…I like that! There was no, “Effective March 1st, I will no longer…,” you gave your team that push that they needed. There is no doubt that some probably had an interest, but just never took that first step into the world of blogging. I will remember the cold-turkey method.

    Another big plus that you pointed out in making your decision to stop e-mail communication, is the way information is archived. To me, this is a HUGE help when it comes to getting my “fingers” on that important memo. This is one of the points that I have sold others on.

    Thanks for the great post!

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