Blogging is important to me (and school leaders) on several levels.

1. First, in order to be an effective leader in our school communities we must be visible and open for feedback. Blogs allow yet another avenue of expression for us, and we can artfully do so while also building in a level of educational influence not only for our students but for their families.
2. Modeling effective use of technology for our faculty and showing that “if I can do it, you can too!” means a lot for teachers.  I was the first few members of my school community to be a blogger and now we have almost all of our kids grade 5-12 blogging along with the majority of our teachers.  I can say the same thing about podcasting, but that is another posting!
3. Going back to point #1… It gave me a chance to point my parents to other avenues of education for themselves.  This “parent education” portion allowed me to hammer home some of the educational ideals my organization stood for and also made visiting my school information “fun” and “informative” (not my words… but the words of the parents who spoke to me about my blogs).
4. Through this process I built a community of learners.  Given another year I believe I could have convinced the majority of parents that RSS feeds were the way to go and we could push content, and information so easily I would make our lives as communications creators much easier.  I changed jobs this year (within the same organization) and I am not in a position to continue this effort at the same level.
5. I saved money.  LOTS of MONEY!  No paper.  No printing costs.  No delivery costs. No staff time dedicated to gathering and laying out newsletters.
6. I save time.  My time. Parents time. Organizational time.
   

I am so excited to see our superintendent, Jenny Seals,  and our school improvement specialist, Jan Bailey, joining the edublogosphere.  You can check out their blogs as they develop them-

http://sccschoolimprovement.edublogs.org

http://scc….edublogs.org (I will check the address and update on Friday)