During today’s In-Service, Longniddry Primary staff got some hands-on practice with the eduBuzz blog system so more people can update the school site, and so that they’re ready to make a start with class blogs.
The school’s Development Plan for the year includes work on parental involvement, and the blog-based school web site is one of the tools they’ll be using. They’re also keen to develop class-specific web pages which will provide a more to-the-point channel of communication with busy parents.
East Lothian’s Parental Involvement consultation found that primary parents liked the idea of a class-specific web page. A survey finding was that today’s busy parents might want to be involved with the school, but only had time to be involved with their own children’s classes. For that purpose, a whole-school site can be a turn-off, as these people don’t have time to dig around in search of class-specific informatiion.
After the CPD session, Melanie Bertram and I explored some other new ways to use the school blog:
- Subscribe by email: we used Feedblitz to set up an email subscription service for the school site (subscribe here)
- This is set to provide a nightly email with the latest posts.
- Feedblitz is a powerful RSS-to-email service which offers a free basic service.
- Linking class blog posts to the school site: using Chris Hatcher’s firstRSS plugin, we explored how up-to-date headlines from a class blog can be syndicated to that class’s Page on the main school site (example here).
- This enables interested readers to click-through to see the full post on the class site.
I’m looking forward to seeing what new ideas this group come up with over the next few weeks.