This year we have allocated larger blocks of time to 4 longer blocks; each is about 90 minutes long. In the past, the school operated on a 6-period day with significantly shorter class periods. In order to accomplish this, we took a look at our data, “faced the brutal facts,”¹ and committed to focus — at least in the short-term — on math and literacy. Each of our students receives 90 minutes of math and literacy every single day. Science and social studies are taught for 90 minutes every other day or for a semester².

I believe that the closest thing we in education will find to a “silver bullet” are time and instruction. Purposeful adjustments to those two levers can pay dividends that exceed any canned academic program. I shared the graphic below with the staff and challenged them to dream up ways to see less of the orange circle. Now that we have adjusted to our new schedule, the remainder of this year and beyond will see our focus shift to maximizing every student’s academic learning time during that 90 minutes.

Our priority will be on a common academic language that communicates a culture of high expectations and academic excellence. We will also identify and adopt school-wide systems that are aligned from classroom to classroom. I made the comparison to Starbucks. You can go into any Starbucks and, while they all look a little different and have their own personality, there is never any doubt that you’re in a Starbucks. They don’t change the latté recipe. A Venti is still a Venti. The menu looks the same. The customer knows what to expect and doesn’t have to re-learn the menu every time they’re jonesing for a caramel macchiato.

At the end of my presentation, I asked the staff to reflect on a simple question: What do we want to give to our kids? I’m truly motivated and ready for the work that we have ahead. It’s good work and it’s important work.

1. I don’t care for that phrase. Sometimes the facts are not pleasant, but the word “brutal” is just so… well… Brutal…
2. During our pilot year, some teams teach science and social studies on an A/B rotation and some flip classes at the semester.

I’m [obviously] interested in technology leadership. One of the “rite of passage” classes I was required to take focused on educational policy. Dry and dull, right? How are they connected? Well, I ended up writing my final paper in the class on DOPA, COPA, CIPA, and COPPA and how the relationship between these pieces of legislation and E-Rate funding are commonly misunderstood or misapplied. The benefit of doing this is that when it came time to really identify a research focus, I had assembled a solid body of literature on which I could draw for my Lit Review².

Once you’ve been accepted, it is also a good time to seek out the person who will be your adviser. In some programs, you may not have a choice. In others, you may have to choose within a certain window of time. The best advice is to get to know as many faculty as you can in your first two or three semesters.

Bonus Tip: Of all the books I read and was forced to read over the program, the best one — and the one I wish I’d owned when I first started — is “Complete Your Dissertation or Thesis in Two Semesters or Less.” I think this is an unfortunate title because it’s not something a first year PhD student would naturally pick up, but there is some very practical advice in the book for students at all stages of the program and even for those who may be pondering whether a PhD is for them.

1. This doesn’t mean you’re making a life commitment, but if you have a broad area in which you’re interested it’ll help. A lot.
2. The Lit Review you will have to write for your dissertation will usually be Chapter 2 of the final product. As much of this as you can get out of the way ahead of time, the better.

Let me give you the quick and dirty on what my program (and I believe many others in the US) looked like.

The degree is 90 semester hours. That sounds intimidating until you learn that 30 hours usually come from your masters program and 15 hours are dissertation credits. That leaves you with about 45 semester hours of coursework to tackle. No small feat, granted. But if you’re going to do this you need to know what lays ahead.

Your 45 hours of coursework will be made up of a few different kinds of classes. Some of them will be research methods classes. These classes essentially teach you how to do valid research. In my program, I was required to take courses in both quantitative and qualitative methods. Some are very general and provide an overview of the methodological approach. In my opinion, these are good classes to take while you’re relatively new to the program because they will help you get your head around the kind of research you may want to do.

Other methods classes are more specific and deal specifically with a particular flavor of one of the methodological approaches. For instance, I took a class that specifically focused on narrative inquiry¹ Still others focus on quantitative strategies, including one course at CSU in which you can spend an entire semester learning the ins and outs of the ANOVA procedure.

Bonus Tip: Methods classes, especially quantitative methods classes, tend to involve less writing. The ones I took rarely involved a substantial paper at the end of the term. If you’re going to take two classes in a semester, I suggest balancing a content-focused class with a methods class.

Another subset of the classes you’ll be expected to take will focus on your major². In my program, these included courses with names like “Leadership,” “Teaching, Learning, and Professional Growth,” and “Educational Policy.” These are often very heavy on the reading and writing and you should think twice before taking two of them at a time while trying to work and actually spend time with your family.

As you approach the end of your coursework, you will eventually transition from being a “grad student” or “doctoral student” to being a “doctoral candidate.” I liked this. It made me feel like I was actually getting somewhere. I was frequently reminded in my program that about 50% of PhD students never receive their degree³. Some portion of those “drop outs” end up ABD⁴ because they make it as far as the candidate stage but can’t close the deal.

In order to become a candidate, you need to have completed most of your coursework and take what is commonly called a “preliminary exam.” These are different from school to school. I’ve also heard them called “comps.” Essentially, it is an opportunity to show your committee that you are ready to take on your own research. In my program, I had four weeks to write a research article from start to finish and then defend⁵ it. This basically meant that I had to field questions about what I did, why I did it, and how I could have done it better. For me, this was scarier than the dissertation phase because you have zero guidance and come into the meeting cold. At least with the dissertation, your committee will have seen drafts along the way and you can reasonably predict what they’re going to ask or tell you.

Once you’re a “candidate,” all that stands between you and your PhD is that pesky little paper called a “dissertation” or “thesis.” Here’s the rub: You are paying for the privilege of writing your paper at this point. You are no longer attending classes regularly, yet you are enrolled in those 15 credit hours I told you about at the beginning of this article. I have a hunch that this is where many ABDs lose their momentum since they are no longer accountable on weekly basis and are essentially on their own timeline.

Although there are always exceptions, the general rule of thumb is that your dissertation will have five chapters: Intro, Lit Review, Methods, Analysis, Conclusion. Before you will be allowed to actually do the dissertation, however, you have to “propose” your dissertation. My proposal consisted of the first three chapters of my dissertation basically outlining the problem, presenting a review of the literature, and describing how I plan to conduct my research. Once my proposal has been successfully defended⁶, I can go about collecting my data and writing chapters four and five.

Once all of that is finished, it’s time for the “Dissertation Defense.” This is a lengthier, two-hour-ish meeting in which you present your study to your committee (and, at CSU, anyone else who happens to want to come as they are open to the public). Once you’ve done your bit, the committee can ask you questions. After that, they send you out of the room and talk about you behind your back. At that point, the next thing you want to hear is your adviser coming to get you and calling you, “Dr. Such-and-Such.”

So that’s a pretty thorough description of roughly what to expect if you decide to take the plunge and start a PhD program. More to follow!

1. This is a flavor of qualitative research that, at its most basic, focuses on gathering research that tells a story.
2. for lack of a better word
3. http://guidetogradschoolsurvival.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/phd-completion-rates/
4. “All but dissertation”
5. There’s that word again. Remember, “defend” really means “meet with your committee and discuss.”
6. Again with the defending?

The bulk of my (non-work) time since I presented my prelim to my committee² in August has been spent working on what grad school folks refer to as the dissertation proposal.³ I completed this last month and am set to defend⁴ it in a few weeks. In the meantime, since I can’t actually start working on my research until my proposal is approved AND I receive approval from the IRB⁵, I figured I’d try to squeeze out a few blog posts. Since this PhD thing is what’s been consuming a significant amount of my time, that seems like the most relevant thing to post about at the moment.

In the interest of keeping me on track for a while with my blogging, I figured I’d put together a simple series of short posts with some advice and experiences that may prove useful if you are an educational leader considering embarking on a PhD program. I have no idea how many installments I’ll come up with, but feel free to ask any questions that you have as well.

Every school is different, but since I have been contacted by a few fellow educational leaders on the Twitter asking about the PhD program, I figured I’d hit the highlights. I can speak only from my own experience as someone who is nearing the end of his program so YMMV.

Expect the first installment tomorrow. I promise.

1. This is higher-edu-speak for “someone who has taken all of the classes that he or she can possibly take and passed his or her preliminary exam and now has no excuse not to sit down and write that darn dissertation he or she has been pretending doesn’t exist.”
2. Yes, you get your very own committee. At CSU, you are mostly free to choose your own committee. There have to be at least four members. More on that later.
3. Essentially, you write a plan of what you will do for your dissertation. More on that later.
4. The word “defense” sounds a bit intimidating, right? Again, it’s higher-edu-speak for what basically amounts to a meeting with your committee in which you lay out your plan for your study.
5. The “IRB” is the Institutional Review Board. Their job is to make sure that any research conducted using human subjects is done ethically and with minimal risk to the participants.

• May saw some significant layoffs due to a RIF in my district. Not a lot of fun for a first-year principal who spent the entire year building culture.
• June was a great month for me as it was the second summer that I was fortunate to teach “Leadership & Ethics in Public Education” in the principal licensure cohort at CSU.
• July started with an amazing family road trip to see my grandmother for her 90th birthday, take the kids to Washington, DC, and visit my brother and his family in Charlotte.
• July into August I was back at work planning and working with my new assistant principal on clarifying a vision for my second year leading the best middle school on the Front Range.

And what’s to come this year?

• I just finished and defended my preliminary exam so I’m officially a PhD candidate now. Or, “ABD.”
• I am working on my dissertation proposal and hoping to defend this fall.
• I’ve got several staff members who will be joining me as presenters at the CAMLE Schools-to-Watch Conference in a few weeks.
• Hopefully, after a marathon 2010-2011 year in which I was a brand new principal and completed my final four (yes, four…) required grad school classes, Melinda and I will be able to make time to record your favorite podcast on a semi-regular basis again.

More later!

In my house, we generally run on a 3-4 year laptop replacement cycle. My 2007 MacBook Pro 15″ (pre-unibody) started showing signs of being long in the tooth shortly after it was out of AppleCare warranty (naturally). Dodgy fan issues, spontaneous shutdowns, and other issues made it unreliable for dissertation-writing and general use.

When the new MacBook Airs made their appearance in October of 2010, my initial thoughts were, “Way cool! But not for serious work.” After taking a long, hard look at what I actually use my computer for (writing, surfing, emailing, light podcasting, light photo editing) instead of what I wish I used a computer for (massive video editing and audio recording, professional-level photo-editing), I decided that I would probably be very happy with an Air — especially in the portability department.

I’d been saving for a while and, despite almost backing down at the eleventh hour and ordering a 13″ MacBook Pro, a considerable amount of research pushed me over the edge and I pulled the trigger on an 11″ MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM and a 64GB of SSD.

Rookie Mistakes

Moving in to a new computer is always liberating and stressful, but when your new digs only provide 64GB of disk space, some extra diligence is required. Prior to the new machine’s arrival, I started a Simplenote with all of the apps I use regularly. These were the ones I’d install right away.

I overcompensated a bit, though. I moved my entire 90GB iTunes library onto an external USB drive. I did the same with my Aperture library. If you’re reading this looking for tips on MacBook Air file management, let me give you a big one: DO NOT DO WHAT I DID!

In theory, having your iTunes library on an external drive sounds like the way to go. That is until you actually want to sync an iPhone or listen to music. Then you have to have your drive with you and plug it in. I found this to be unacceptable since one of the main reasons I bought this machine was to have the extra portability.

Further, I found it to be ridiculous hauling my entire Aperture library around with me all the time. Plus, having my images on the external USB drive killed the zippiness that the SSD provides when it comes to accessing and navigating through my images.

So the external drive solution killed the two biggest benefits of moving to an Air: Being tethered to an external drive lowered the portability factor, and moving large image files back and forth over USB 2.0 negated the speed benefits of the SSD.

How I Roll

After living with this for a few weeks, I’ve come up with the following solutions that work well for me.

I have to credit The Mac Instructor Blog for pushing my thinking on the iTunes issue. The author, Rick Stawarz, had a great post about Home Sharing which is arguably the most under-utilized feature in iTunes. If I’m being honest, at any given time I’m probably actively listening to less than 500MB of my 90GB library. I turned my old MacBook Pro (which has been relegated to Club Penguin duty since it constantly has to be plugged in) into my “main” music library. With Home Sharing enabled on both my Air and my old Pro, I can delete music from my Air with the confidence of knowing it will remain in my “official” library on my Pro. I have also set up iTunes on the Pro to auto-import new music and apps from my Air so I also have the assurance that anything I purchase on my Air (or on my iPhone or iPad which are synced to the Air) will eventually find its way back to the Pro.

So all of my music and movies reside on the Pro with its 500GB hard drive. The Pro is also the machine that syncs video with my (first-gen) Apple TV so this works very well. Just within the last week, I’m seeing some promise in Amazon’s Cloud Drive for those of us with more music than disk space.

For images, I read a post at the Aperture Users Network that turned me on to Aperture 3′s library splitting/merging features. In short, I can keep my full Aperture library on an external USB drive while still carrying around, say, my last 30-days worth of images. Images I add or changes I make on the Air will sync when I plug in my USB drive and “merge” libraries.

As it stands right now, I have 30-days worth of images and a decent library of my current favorite music on my Air and I’m sitting with just over 22GB of free space.

Back That Thing Up

The last piece of the puzzle for me is backup. Having been burned last summer when my wife’s 2006 “BlackBook” died very suddenly, I have become a little obsessed with backup. I have taken many of the ideas herein from the comprehensive backup strategy shared by Frank Chimero.

For starters, I use Dropbox for most of my working files. I have cleaned things up quite a bit and now use a similar system to that described by Chimero for folder and file naming. Older stuff has been zipped up and pushed to my Amazon S3 account (more on that later).

I recently discovered Amazon S3′s Reduced Redundancy Storage. Using a nifty, lightweight app called Arq, my entire home directory is backed up to my S3 account. (I also installed Arq on my wife’s MacBook Pro and it does its thing without ever getting in her way.) My bill for March, backing up both of our machine’s to the cloud, was $2.22. Considering most of that was for the “throughput” of the initial backup (subsequent backups just make incremental changes and push far less data), I’d say this is a pretty economical solution. Almost too cheap and easy not to use. There is no excuse for not backing up.

In addition to all that, once a week I use SuperDuper to clone my entire 64GB hard drive to one of two external USB drives. This is a 500GB portable USB drive partitioned into three sections: (1) backup, (2) libraries, and (3) scratch. My cloned HDD image is stored in the backup section. My Aperture library and a backup copy of my iTunes library are stored in the libraries section. I use the scratch section for moving things back and forth, or for audio or video recording and editing. This drive is small and travels with me in my Tom Bihn Ristretto.

Finally, the entire 500GB drive is cloned once a week to an identical drive that I keep at work.

I told you I was a bit OCD about backups.

Bored Yet?

If you’ve made it this far and are still awake, thanks for reading. I hope that you’ve found some of this to be helpful in some way. In short, if you’re contemplating a jump to the MacBook Air, do it! You won’t be sorry. And once you tweak some of your file management techniques you’ll be glad you decided to on the smallest, lightest MacBook to date.

The Why

I have a personal goal to support teachers in talking to each other about their practice. As Elmore points out, “one of the greatest barriers to school improvement is the lack of an agreed-upon definition of what high-quality instruction looks like” (p. 3). The rounds process is intended to bring conversations about instructional practice into the school improvement process. The rounds process is adapted from the medical rounds model and includes “observing, analyzing, discussing, and understanding instruction” (p. 3).

My hope is that I can expand this school-wide next year, but I wanted to start small. I worked with my instructional coach to solicit seven teacher volunteers to be part of this pilot. I have a cross-section of disciplines, grade levels, and experience and we meet biweekly for a total of seven sessions. Each teacher will open their classroom to the group one time and have the opportunity to observe the other six over the course of the pilot.

In Elmore’s parlance, I have a theory of action that looks something like this:

If we develop and nurture a school culture that supports collaborative inquiry and the sharing of best teaching practices, then classroom instruction will be strengthened and students will learn in deeper, more authentic ways.

The How

The participants voluntarily come in to pre-brief at 6:45am on lab days. They have no incentive other than coffee and conversation along with their commitment to improve their practice through sharing in the lab experience. Though all participants are observing the same class at the same time, each bring a different inquiry question to the lab experience. These questions run the gamut and are highly dependent on the teachers’ interests and perceived areas for growth.

Some examples of inquiry questions from this group:

• How can a teacher foster global citizenship in his or her students?
• What strategies do teachers use to get students talking about text?
• How can social studies teachers more effectively include historical fiction in their units of instruction?
• How can I move students from external accountability to intrinsic responsibility for their learning?
• How can I ensure that my lessons are authentic and connect students with the larger social context?

The teacher being observed may also pose a specific question related to their class being observed. These questions are posted on our neopolitan-colored “Board of Inquiry.”

At our pre-brief, we also assign people to track specific data that the host teacher requests. For instance, this morning we tracked:

• Use of vocabulary by teacher and students that indicates “global literacy”
• Connections from historical fiction text to self
• Wait time between posing a questions and selecting a student to respond

The most challenging part is arranging class coverage for the observing teachers so that we can all be together to observe and de-brief the process. I am very passionate about the success of this pilot and have committed to using a chunk of the sub dollars allocated to me for professional development. On lab days, we use in-house coverage only when absolutely necessary, instead bringing in four or five half-day subs to cover for lab participants.

Following the one-hour classroom observation, we take a short break, top off our coffees, and re-convene for a de-brief.

Once everyone is back together, we sit silently for a few minutes to reflect on our initial observations. We go quickly around the table, sharing an objective, non-value-laden observation about what we’ve seen. Our instructional coach then leads the group through a discussion connecting one or two of the principles from the Elmore book to the lesson we observed.

It is at this point in the process that the requested data is shared and processed, along with other relevant information. For instance, this morning one of the participants noted that the host teacher had asked 70 questions in a 60-minute observation.

The hour-long debrief process usually flies by, and ultimately ends with each participant sharing something that they believe they have learned about the host teachers core principles. Examples include:

• Ms. X seems to value every student’s contribution to her class.
• It seems very important to Ms. X that her students access their personal experience to build background knowledge before tackling new text.
• Based on the discussion, it seems like Ms. X has high expectations that students are able to connect course content to real-world contexts.

Final Thoughts (For Now)

We are two lab cycles in to our pilot project and we continue to re-visit the norms we established at the outset. It is incredibly courageous of the teacher participants to open up their classrooms to their colleagues, and all have expressed their nervousness to do so.

All in all, I think the two teachers who have hosted to this point have come away feeling positive about the experience. My hope is to generate enough energy and momentum to roll this out school-wide next year. The logistics of pulling this off with 44 full-time faculty will be a bit of a challenge, but I believe passionately that this is the work we should be doing so I am committed to figuring out how to make it happen even if it means I’ll be covering classes.

Last Revised in February 8, 2011

One of the things people who know me well will tell you is that I am a major Apple geek. If Apple put their logo on a pair of socks, I’d buy them and proceed to tell everyone I know how superior they are to Windows and Linux socks.

In terms of my work in Narrative Inquiry, I wanted to make mention of a couple of the tools I discovered (or discovered new uses for) over the course of the semester. Some of these I used for transcribing interviews, coding and reviewing notes, and outlining and diagramming major themes. Maybe these can help future students who want to use some digital tools in their narrative research.

Scrivener

A powerful application, Scrivener is used by writers for everything from lengthy legal briefs to crafting the great American novel. I’ve used Scrivener for the first pass of almost all of my academic writing since starting my PhD program in 2007. Version 2.0 was recently released and there is a Windows version in Beta as I write this. In my work for this course, Scrivener was an invaluable tool for transcribing audio files and putting together a final transcript.

iAnnotate PDF

I actually started coding my transcript in hard-copy form. What I couldn’t shake was the sense that pulling the codes together at the end was going to be a lot more work than it needed to be. Using my iPad and iAnnotate, I was able to use several colors of highlighter to identify key themes that I identified in the interview. Once the highlighting was complete, I was able to export the highlighted text as a plain text file for further analysis. The plain text file includes data on the color used to highlight each piece of text.

OmniOutliner Pro

Once I had the plain text out of iAnnotate, the next step was to regroup like colors together into some kind of an outline. For years, the “non-pro” version of OmniOutliner was bundled on every Mac. I used it from time to time for class notes and the like, but doing narrative research I discovered it’s real power to import raw .txt files and simplify the process of cleaning it up and getting it in outline form. Not only does OmniOutliner save in its own native file format, it also has the capability to export outlines in the standard OPML format that can be read by other applications.

OmniGraffle Pro

OmniGraffle Pro has the ability to read files that have been formatted in OPML and turn them into visual displays. At first this was just a way for me to see how far I could push my “all electronic” system, but I really liked the way that it looked. I found that it was nice to have a graphical representation of how the coding was looking.

I’m not sure if this will ever be helpful to other narrative researchers considering how to use their Mac to the best of its ability, but I found this to be a great starting point for my work in this class.

UPDATE 2/8/2011: PDF Expert

With a UI that is far superior to iAnnotate’s, PDF Expert only lacks one feature and that is the ability to export highlighted text to a plain text email. That being said, it’s worth a look if that is not the killer feature for you. I’ve downloaded and used it for class readings when I knew I wouldn’t have a reason to export length quotations.

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.

I spent more than a couple days pondering how I would begin to make this change without being “that guy” who comes in and wants to change everything. I started by connecting with our media specialist who, also being new to the building, had no preconceptions about how the site should look. She was in and out of the building over the summer so we met a few times to talk about my vision for our web presence, her comfort level taking a leadership role in the change, and what she thought a middle school web page should contain. Lucky for me, she is curious and highly self-directed and jumped on board from the beginning.

The Goal

I mentioned earlier that I wanted a “one-stop shop” for visitors. I also wanted each core team (we have six) and the elective team to have their own site where they could keep parents up-to-date on the “goings on” for their team.

Getting Started

I’ll spare you the super technical details and tell you that I am self-hosting a WordPress blog that is configured for multiple users. My media specialist and I are the “Super Admins” and the entire staff has been entered as “Users” of the main school site with the rights to create their own sites underneath.

Because I wanted some consistency, I set up the team blogs myself. I wanted all the team blog domains to be conballms.org/teamname without exception. I wanted to make sure that the Tiger team, for instance, didn’t call their site conballms.org/thetigers and that the Falcons didn’t call their site conballms.org/falconsrock. Other teachers who create classroom blogs have the freedom to choose whatever name they want after the conballms.org/.

I also chose to restrict team blogs to a common theme in order to go for a more consistent look and feel across the whole site. Teams had fun finding banner images for their sites in what almost became a kind of competition.

It took some thinking and tinkering to get things to look and act the way I wanted them to. Here are three plugins that were indispensable to me when I was getting things up and running.

• Import Users by Dagon Design. This plugin allows you to use a big, CSV file to batch create all of your users. Useful if you plan to have more than 5 or 6 people as members of your blog.
• Unfiltered MU. On multi-user installs, your user-created blogs aren’t allowed to post embed code for things like YouTube videos and the like. This plugin overrides this “feature” at your own peril.
• Subscribe2. The deal-breaker. This was how I covered the issue of parents who still wanted a regular email. This plugin allows readers to enter their email address and be subscribed to all of your posts.

I hope that you find at least one or two of those useful and that it saves you hours of scouring the web for the solutions to those simple issues.

The Sell

It was actually easier than I ever thought it would be to get teachers on board. In the past, teams would send out a weekly newsletter via email to a mailing list of parents whose addresses were (manually) collected at Back-to-School Night or Parent-Teacher Conferences. It was a model that made the team leader the “list manager” and “editor-in-chief.” Email addresses had to be entered, updated, changed, or deleted, and “articles” from team members had to be emailed to the team leader, copied, pasted, and formatted into the team newsletter.

At a team leader meeting during my transition into the building, I asked simply, “How is that working so far?” Most responses were lukewarm, citing the management issues already mentioned. By this time, I had already put into place our school site and many of them had commented that they really liked it. I mentioned that I would love it if every team had their own team blog instead of sending weekly emails.

I have an expectation that our core academic teams post at least one update per week and I have subscribed to all of the team blogs in my Google Reader. So far, this has worked extremely well for the core teams. I have to think more about what I expect from the elective teams, but I like what we have going so far.

The Verdict

The response from parents has been overwhelmingly positive. I introduced the site formally during our BTS Night in August and invited them to email me if there was something else they’d like to see on the front page. Many have taken me up on it and since the start of the year I’ve added our lunch schedule, the number for the nurse’s office, and some static info that is commonly requested such as the link to order a yearbook. My front office staff listens for common questions from parents and I make sure that the answers get posted.

My media specialist has stepped up in a huge way. From a slightly tentative user, to someone who enjoys posting pictures and wants to learn more about WordPress.

Overall, I am pleased with this contemporary way of reaching out to parents and our community.

What’s next?

I’ve been inspired by this post by Eric Sheninger, but I am being careful not to bite off too much, too fast. I’d like to get better about regular posts to our Twitter feed, finish rolling out a Facebook page, and start next year by committing to posting monthly principal reports like the one he models. Thanks, Eric, for being one of the most consistent sharers of concrete, actionable advice for principals.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank Tim Lauer for the extensive conversation we had at ISTE last summer and for being my “phone support” as I was putting my school site together.

Still to Come!

In a future post, I’ll blog a bit about how I stopped sending emails to the entire staff and began the year, cold-turkey, using an internal staff blog instead.