Early in the year, I blogged about coming attractions and shared that…
With the beginning of the 2018-2019 school year, and due to significant and overwhelming feedback from parents, teachers, and students, the OJCS is transitioning away from Google Classroom and launching school-wide class blogs. Our new blogging platform will make it a whole lot easier for parents and students to know what is happening in their classes and for teachers and students to share pictures, videos, examples and reflections of the incredible work they are doing.
“We learn better together” is one our North Stars; school blogs will help us expand the concentric circles of “we” to amplify and share the learning.
We held a “Town Hall” on October 3rd (delayed once due to the tornado) in which we laid out our big picture vision for moving towards a blogging platform and to take a tour of the “OJCS Blogosphere”. So. Now that we have made it through the Jewish holidays, essentially restarted school and have finished our first (!) five-day week, it seems like a good time to check in to see how this whole blogging prototype is going.
The first thing that is important is to know that the OJCS Blogosphere exists! There are Lower School Blogs for each class K -5, a Middle School landing page with a calendar of major projects/tests, individual Middle School Teacher Blogs (Math, Language Arts, etc.), School Activities and Special Interest Blogs and Leadership Blogs. You will find increasing and increasingly exciting content on them all. You may also find navigating the blogosphere new, confusing, or frustrating, depending on what you are looking for, how easy it is to find (or not) or whether it is there (yet) at all.
The use of “prototype” to describe our launch of blogs is intentional. It is to remind us that we are trying something new, seeking feedback, and making changes as we go. We are learning what works and what doesn’t. We are also learning what works as a vehicle for education and what works as a vehicle for communication. Recognizing there is no one platform that does everything we want in terms of both education and communication, we are working to fill the gaps. We have appreciated your comments and your suggestions and are meaningfully considering them as we go. For now, however, I thought it might be easier to frame where we currently are as a hypothetical FAQ built on real email questions we have received thus far:
What are the minimum expectations of what is supposed to be where? Is everything on the blogs or do I need monitor email, the website, The Hadashot, etc?
We are in the beginning of a major shift, but the consistency is not yet there. Each teacher/grade-level team was given a rubric for their blogs with the minimum “must-haves” and they include homework, class events, quizzes, and major projects. There are some distinctions between Lower School and Middle School – the Middle School Calendar we created on the homepage for Middle School is intended for major tests/projects (only) for example, but where we are headed is a place where the blogs become the primary (only) source for information.
It is a major transition in two ways.
The first is for students. As they get older and take on greater executive functioning, learning to manage their workloads, where to find homework, etc., transitions from teacher/parent to teacher/student(/parent). There will likely become a point where providing physical agenda books becomes obsolete (with exceptions of course). We are learning as a faculty how to function this way and learning how to help students make the transition.
The second is for parents. With a new website (finally!) going live this week, we can finally reorient our entire communication system. If we treat the website as a blog (for school-wide and/or community-wide communication), then we can start using our Hadashot and all school social media to direct people to the right blog to find the rest of the story. A picture, a headline, and a link should suffice to get people where they need to be.
What do I do if I have children in multiple grades? Do I have to go into each blog and find each relevant thing?
Depending on what you are interested in, you can subscribe (there is a box on each page) to as many blogs as you wish (at which point you will receive an email when each subscribed blog has a new post) or use the social media (email and Constant Contact included) of your choice as a cue to click on what you are interested in. We would highly suggest that you subscribe (at a minimum) to your children’s primary blog(s). [We would love if you subscribed to all the blogs, but that depends on how much email you would like to receive.] It is kind of like the difference between subscribing to my blog or waiting for me to use Facebook/Twitter to share the headline of this week’s post and choosing whether you want to click or not. Of course the school can’t use email or social media to prompt you for everything. You will need to rely on your discretion and your children as well. There is also a piece of this which is about where your children need to go to find what they want/need and where you need to go. Depending on your child (and you) those could be different things. Having lived through this in other schools, I can assure you that you will eventually (sooner than you think!) adapt and adjust.
Did this help answer some of your questions or concerns? If you have additional ones, I encourage you to comment on this blog post or email/call/drop in. I will happily answer your questions and happily share out in future posts additional FAQs.
How will we know if a move to the blogosphere is right for OJCS? The same way we (now) measure any significant initiative – do they bring us closer to our North Stars? Does utilizing blogs help us…
…own our learning?
…learn better together?
…inspire Jewish journeys?
…provide a floor, but not a ceiling?
…experience ruach?
…be more responsible each to the other?
I would argue emphatically that it does. But don’t take my word for it. Go see it for yourself! The future is here and it is open, collaborative, reflective, transparent, personalized, transformative and limitless. Students coming out of OJCS will not only be prepared to participate in this world, they will be prepared to thrive and to lead.
