Utility of an open source school blog

I setup a blog for my school - Neale-Wade Community College - early in 2008.  Nothing revolutionary and incredibly innovative about that, but I really felt the blog had the potential to be a positive driving force to encourage colleagues to share and update information.

The problem for us what that our website was never updated rapidly and frequently enough.  Without a specfic paid responsibility to do this, I, as the Head of ICT, have continued doing the role.  The school admin staff do update the College letters and relevant information but what wasn't appearing were the important, innovative and interesting things going on in College.

We've got the main College website on the 'offical' school domain - http://www.neal-wade.cambs.sch.uk but I setup the blog on our sister site - http://www.neale-wade.net.  I decided to use Wordpress, the brilliant open-source blogging platform simply because I've used it before and I felt that all colleagues would be able to use it.  The moderation funtions were also ideal.  A member of staff could be given an account to author posts and they could directly control the comments that follow.  No comment appears until that member of staff (or an adminstrator of the blog) approves it.  Each time a comment is made, the member of staff gets an e-mail to ask them to moderate.

An ideal system for any school, build completely on open-source software. 

Over the past year the blog has been used really well for a number of areas - specific parts of the College were catching on at how immediate and useful a blog could be.  This was pleasing, but I could still see far more potential.

One benefit is how the blog makes the main College site appear fresh and updated.  The RSS feed from the blog is shown in a ticker at the top of the main College website.  As a new post is made, it instantly appears at the top of the main website.

However, over the last few days the College blog has completely exploded for one reason - the snow.  On Monday morning I was able to post details about the College still being open.  From around 06.50am I'd posted a message on the blog saying that the College was open and directed people to listen to the local radio and check back for further updates.  By 7.30am, when I left for work, it was clear we weren't going to shut for snow.  However the blog had proved powerful - we'd had around 450 unique visits that morning, showing staff, parents and students were using it as a reference.

When I got into College on Monday students kept telling me how they'd looked at the blog and found it really helpful.  It seemed that the blog was no longer being seen as something extra but rather something that was accepted as a standard reference. If you look at Monday's post - http://www.neale-wade.net/blog/?p=647 - you can see that it wasn't anything special but it included links to find out more information as required.  We had a couple of comments too.  On Monday afternoon the College actually closed early so I updated the blog further with this information.

It was clear that the blog was being used as a reference source - this was pleasing.

However, nothing prepared me for what would happen yesterday - Thursday 5th February.   It was clear the weather was poor, with quite heavy snow overnight.  I put a new blog post up, basically copying Monday's post saying that currently the College was open, but do keep checking back for more information.  This was at 06.50ish and I kept updating it every five or so minutes.

At 07.16 the Principal of the College phoned - informing me that the College was closed and could I update the blog posting.  Immediately I was able to update the message and instantly the blog (and consequently the website via the RSS feed) was able to get the message out.  The Principal also told me that he was having immense difficulties getting through to the local radio stations.  Thus the blog was the main communication method.  The county council was contacted but they update their list by editing and uploading a Word document.  Fair enough, but this takes a while to appear.

Within the next hour we got hundreds of visits to the blog - and 17 comments offering thanks and further details / requests.  By the afternoon we had 23 or so.  This was the highest amount of comments we'd ever had for a blog posting and it was clear that the College was using the blog as a really positive tool for communication.  As we were also getting comments back it was great to see this was no longer just a one way tool - this was educational Web 2.0 in action.

In the middle of the afternoon the Principal phoned me again and asked me to setup a new post.  This time he wanted to gather people's opinions about Friday (i.e. today).  We had conflicting weather reports, are a distinctly rural school with some students and staff from some very rural locations.  Plus we have staff arriving from many different directions outside of the main town of March - Peterborough, Kings Lynn, Ely and Cambridge to name just four.

I didn't realise it at the time, but this was the post that would prove the worth of the College blog.  Whereas it had been my brainchild, my creation, my time in setting it all up and my persuasion to get staff to use it, this one idea from the Principal had a transformational impact.  I'd done the technical setup and got it all rolling, but his experience was the key turning point.

We posted the following at 15:49 [see the actual post]:

Mr Hitch would like to hear the views of parents, staff and students - what do you think about opening on Friday? How many of can make it into College tomorrow? Have you seen the latest weather forecast?

 We’d like to gather together your opinions and suggestions. Please do leave a comment.

Within an hour we'd had 14 replies.  Mostly from students and, as you'd expect, they were suggesting the College be closed tomorrow.  Yet these comments were not over the top or daft, these were students genuinely taking the opportunity to try and persuade their headteacher why they felt the College should remain closed.

Within the next hour we had 36 comments - now gaining traction with some staff and parents leaving their thoughts.

By six thirty we had around 65 comments with no sign of it stopping.  We were gathering a range of fews from the whole College community.  By the midnight last night we had a total of 172 comments - (we ended up with 184 by this morning).  They had been two extras which I didn't allow though (one was daft and the other was from another local schoolchild swearing).

This morning (Friday) I was phoned by the Principal at 06.50 and a decision to close the College had been made.  I'm not yet sure how much the blog influenced him, but were were one of the first in the county to close.  Quite a few schools opened today and were then forced to send students home, closing middle to late morning.   I'd like to think he'd felt empowered by the support and views on the blog to take a tricky decision early on.  It was clearly the right decision to take.

Anyway - my apologies for going on so long - but I was really eager to share what I hope is an example of really good practice.  Use of an open source Web 2.0 blogging tool - and not just as window dressing or some sort of added extra.  This is using open source software as a key communication tool.

Useful links:
Wordpress - open source blogging software
Neale-Wade Community College blog
Neale-Wade Community College website