Tag Archives: Blogging

About a month ago, I did an informal survey of readers of G-Town Talks. An unprecedented number of you responded, 68 readers in total. I’m just finding the time to look at who and where you are, and what you do for a living.

Readers who responded hail from 19 states and 3 countries, including Canada, Africa, Israel, Arizona, Minnesota, New Jersey, Washington, Michigan, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Montana, Virginia, Texas, California, Illinois, Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas, Wyoming, and Virginia.

Twenty three respondents are from our school district to include 11 teachers, 2 BOE members, 8 parents, 2 students, 4 support staff, and 2 alumni(sometimes readers fill dual roles). Other Western New York educators include 2 superintendents, 2 principals, 2 tech support, and 3 BOCES staff developers. Across the world we are principals, administrative interns, teachers, college faculty, superintendents, librarians, tech support personnel, researchers, and HR managers. And for the record, my mom, brother, daughter, and husband. 🙂

What does this tell me? That we’re all interested in education, many specifically in G-Town. That’s hardly a surprise. There’s a reason that I’m not reading blogs on when the trout run.

Just thought I should come back to the “experiment” and report out to you. See that’s what happens with readers, I now feel a responsibility to you. To keep writing, to share honestly, to get my word into your ear, to provoke your thinking, and in some cases, to try to influence your thinking.

If you commented, thank you. Makes me feel like we’re in this together. And that’s part of it too, isn’t it?

So Will, thanks to you and the fact that you pointed the Education Week reporter our way, we have some word about principal blogs getting into the “traditional” media which should, ultimately, lead to more of my colleagues joining the discussion about education. That means I get access to more great ideas from all of the talented educators working hard every day. Thanks to Jeff Archer for a great article.

Leaders’ Blogs Offer Candid Views on Life in Schools

Welcome to the new readers who are linking from Education Week and who are commenting here. Please consider stepping in, reading, and writing–I have much to learn and you might have the big idea for which I’m searching.

Any time I change this presentation, like I have recently with the Tarski presentation, I experience problems. James Farmer at Edublogs is working on this theme, but G-Town Readers’ comments have shown up on the wrong posts. So here I am, back with my original theme. The other presentation afforded me some features I don’t get here, but readers’ comments are the most important part of blogging so we’ll just stick with this one until it’s worked out.  Sorry for the confusion.

Thank you to the 46 53  67 (and counting, think we’ll let this experiment ride a while) readers who responded to the referers/readers survey! I’ll give it a couple of days to be sure everyone has responded who wanted to, and then post a summary of who YOU are–and James said you wouldn’t comment if asked. 🙂

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about Jeff Archer, who’s doing an article about this blog for Education Week. One of the things that Jeff and I talked about was the number of “referers” to the blog each day. This is the way stats are shown on edublogs.

Jeff’s colleague, Jeanne, contacted James Farmer at edublogs.org and asked about the referers statistics. Apparently, most blogs follow page views rather than hits or referers. James Farmer responded as follows,

“I think it’s fair to say that hits, in the manner of her site (given theme choice), would correlate roughly to be divisible by 2-3 to page views”

I suppose this means that on April 15, when I had 3019 referers, I can estimate that there were 1000-2000 page views. I also wonder if this means that there were 1000-2000 readers?

More important, it makes me wonder who the readers of G-Town are. I know who some readers are through their comments or through the address listed as the referring URL. But I wonder who’s reading, from where.

So I thought we’d try a little experiment. If you’ve stuck with my post this far, please post a comment to this blog. Right here, right now. Even if you’ve never commented before, it’s really very easy. If you are reading this, post a comment that just tells your name or initials, where you’re reading from, and if possible, what you do. That’s all. For example, I would post a comment that says “ksm from Gowanda, high school principal and parent”. Nothing more is needed, but will tell an interesting picture of who our G-Town readers really are. Audience is important for any writer and I’d love a better view of who you are–your comments will be more valuable than any other stats.

Thank you for participating!

I’ve been putting things away, doing laundry, and cleaning up all day long. Well, not all day, I just woke up from a brief nap, which was much needed. Our flight from Philadelphia to Buffalo was cancelled, but we did get on a later flight. I hit my bed at 12:45 this morning, after about 29 hours of travel.

As I read through the entries over the past ten days, I realize that this G-Town Talks blog took on a different focus and served another purpose for parents and readers. Unfortunately, I also realize that my writing is better when I take the time to edit and rethink at the end of drafting a post. This was time I just didn’t have on the trip.

As I reconnected with my family today, it was actually easier because of the blog. I didn’t have to recall as many details to fill them in on our adventure. It saved some time. With 8 loads of laundry and a dining room table filled with mail, that was time I was glad to have. Some might argue that it’s more worthwhile to talk it all through. But really, who wants to listen to every detail anyway? It’s like the relative who wants to show all of her vacation videos or photos. This blog gave a snapshot every day, sort of the way it’s better when your colleague brings only 5-10 of his favorite vacation photos to share instead of asking you to look through 950 of them.

I’ve been writing about G-Town on this blog for ten months and it’s consistently been about our students and school management. This trip travelogue allowed a glimpse into just one more aspect of student and in this case, principal, life.

Thanks for joining us for our journey. It was a privilege and a pleasure to bring you along.

Here are a few interesting things coming out of this blogging gig. . .

1. One of our BOE members reads the blog and was kind enough to tell me at last night’s Board meeting that we are getting our desks after all–it’s a planned expenditure for this budget year. WOO HOO! I’m glad he read the blog post from the other day and shared the great news.

2. There’s an article by Will Richardson in the April, 2007 DistrictAdministration magazine, p. 89, called “Administrators Who Blog”, in which Will talks about G-Town Talks–feels very cool.

3. I mentioned in a post the other day that Jeff Archer is writing an article about blogging for Education Week. He’s reviewing my stats with his tech expert, Jeanne, and I’m hoping to really understand what my “referers” information, my daily hits, means. In edublogs, there’s a referers list and this is where I’ve seen my counts grow over the past nine months. For example, so far today my referers hit number is at 1217. What does that mean? Is it that my blog has been accessed 1217 times today? My high number was 1800+ and I’ve hit it twice. How does that differ from page views? Techie friends, an explanation please. . .

Earlier today, I spent about an hour talking to a writer named Jeff Archer from Education Week about my blogging experience. From my point of view, it was a great conversation because it forced me to think about where I’ve been over the past nine months. As we talked, I thought about my purpose in writing. How it helps me to organize my thoughts about G-Town for the blog post and also allows me to try to influence or challenge some thinking.

What’s really most important about the blogging process though, is how it challenges and influences my own thinking which in turn guides my leadership, and well, influences teachers, staff, students, parents, and community members. As my thinking evolves, I still struggle with the entire School 2.0 discussion that I keep reading on many different blogs and in print. My struggle lies in my core belief that the majority of our constituency will be extremely reluctant to, and may never, consider an entire reinvention of school. While I can sit at my computer in the evening hours and dream about ideal, I often find it hard to reconcile what I’m learning on-line with what I live every day. And the people who I know don’t exactly embrace change, generally like things the way they are, and figure “if it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for them”.

So imagine my connection when I read Will Richardson’s post about reinvisioning schools where Will, who by the way is someone who greatly influences my thinking, says,

but what I’m realizing in this process is that for now, we have to work within the frame of what schools can become in the current environment, not necessarily some vague idea of what we think they should be.

Thank you Will, because that comment makes me feel as if we can actually get there in my professional lifetime. While I’m all in to embrace new ideas and approaches, certainly new ways to help our students find success, I need to find a way to make it happen within what we already live–our school walls.

I’m completely ready to view the plans for a remodel, just can’t imagine a demolition and rebuild.