We’re back for day 2 (actually half-day 2) of the annual Leadership Conference here in the overly-large school district.
This morning we’ll have mostly school-based administrators attending a couple of sessions on topics centered around our themes for the year and the always-present school board goals.
I will be assisting with two sections on using blogs and wikis.
I’d be much more excited about that if we weren’t forced to use the web-2.0-with-training-wheels package that’s wedged into our Blackboard system (and about which I’ve ranted a few too many times).
The one with no RSS feed, no search, and extremely limited access to anyone outside of the immediate class.
However, one of my goals this school year is to find five of our principals who are willing to experiment with blogging in the outside world, so anyone in their community can read, comment and interact.
Maybe I can find one of them this morning.
So during our two sessions I’ll be helping to sell the tools for which we’ve paid lots of money and received so little value (and which have rightly gotten very little use).
However, I’ll also be sneaking around in the background trying to sell our district leaders on the larger concept of speaking to the larger audience that lives outside the walled garden.
For our district blog that we started for new teachers in Blogger we did “take it off the grid,” which doesn’t allow it to be searchable. Maybe that’s an option that would make it more appealing. It’s still on the web and accessible to everyone, but you can’t search for it and I don’t believe it comes up when you push the “next blog” button.
School Center is the same thing as Blackboard: There’s a blog tool that confusingly (and incorrectly) refers to each post as a “blog” (so yes, you post “blogs” on your “blogs”). No RSS feed (although their software has a reader in the user tools), no search, no blogroll, and embedded flash and javascript are automatically stripped out, so no embedded video, audio, slideshare, etc etc. Definitely no trackback. Just enough that they can get that box checked on CMSmatrix and offer it as a selling point to the unaware.
I need a good quotable article that says something about how a blog needs certain capabilities to succeed. (Although that just creates a paradox…an anti-blog person won’t let themselves be enlightened by a blog post).