The hardest part of starting a blog shouldn’t be choosing a picture. Yet here I sit combing through virtual folders of images captured over the course of the last school year. After eight inspiring years teaching in a sixth-grade classroom, I am wrapping up my first year as a communications coordinator for a school district of 6,000 students in Northeast Wisconsin. And I’m starting a blog as soon as I can find the right background picture.
My goal in (eventually) publishing this blog is to support a roundtable discussion that I will be leading at the upcoming National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA) conference in Nashville next week: “Lessons Learned from My Rookie Year in School PR.” It seems many of my colleagues are seasoned PR pros and I am hopeful the voice of a math-teacher-turned-PR-amateur has a place in our realm.
A large part of my new role is to share things: information, news, stories, ideas, videos, and pictures. Really it isn’t much different than my last position in that regard. Teaching is sharing opportunities and resources for students to explore, question, and learn. Teaching is building relationships for the purpose of igniting passion and compassion, curiosity and community. As a teacher I used information, news, stories, ideas, videos and photos to try and achieve those goals. Same game, right?
So back to the blog - what picture would capture the essence of teaching and learning in 2015? Certainly not desks in rows, but there is a time and place for that. Probably not books anymore, yet I still don’t own a Kindle. Pencils? Recess? Flexibly-seated, differentiated, multi-aged groups of children leading their own learning experience? Do I have a picture to capture all those words? And then what image could possibly distill the complexity of school communications?
Ultimately, I think the picture changes. Class-to-class, hour-to-hour, kid-to-kid, teaching was rarely the same approach to meet the needs of the day. I’ve learned that School PR is similar. Communications 101 teaches us to align audience, message, tone, and medium. In the social media age of school communications, I’m learning that some things are Tweetable, others need to be Facebooked, and I guess I need to get LinkedIn to something soon.
Since my first career in collegiate athletics media relations (1997-2006) to teaching (2006-2014) to now, there have been significant software advances - I’m guessing my Aldus PageMaker 4.0 proficiency is less valuable than it once was. (Side note: apparently a scrolling ticker on your website is no longer a must-have feature.) I have experienced quite a learning curve this year. The lifelong-learner mantra I preached as a teacher has come full circle.
Although I’m not a visual learner, research shows social media is a visual game. I learn by hearing and reading. So today, to begin, I think my blog picture is books. As I pack and prepare for my first NSPRA experience, my goal is to create some more blog posts to chronicle our roundtable conversations and the conference as a whole. With good fortune, some motivation, and the right pictures, maybe this blog will live beyond the next week. In the meantime, I hope this space becomes insightful and interesting to those who visit. And if you have any ideas for pictures...please share.
*Credits: hat tip to Joe Donovan (@heyjoedonovan), Delaina McCormack (@delainanicole), Jason Wheeler (@WheelerCFB), and Todd Sanders (@tsand): all content producers and distributors worth following who have directly and indirectly influenced my dive into bloggerdom. If this proves interesting and compelling to readers, they share credit. And thanks to Corey Wilson (@WilsonPhotoLLC) for the picture of the books.
My goal in (eventually) publishing this blog is to support a roundtable discussion that I will be leading at the upcoming National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA) conference in Nashville next week: “Lessons Learned from My Rookie Year in School PR.” It seems many of my colleagues are seasoned PR pros and I am hopeful the voice of a math-teacher-turned-PR-amateur has a place in our realm.
A large part of my new role is to share things: information, news, stories, ideas, videos, and pictures. Really it isn’t much different than my last position in that regard. Teaching is sharing opportunities and resources for students to explore, question, and learn. Teaching is building relationships for the purpose of igniting passion and compassion, curiosity and community. As a teacher I used information, news, stories, ideas, videos and photos to try and achieve those goals. Same game, right?
So back to the blog - what picture would capture the essence of teaching and learning in 2015? Certainly not desks in rows, but there is a time and place for that. Probably not books anymore, yet I still don’t own a Kindle. Pencils? Recess? Flexibly-seated, differentiated, multi-aged groups of children leading their own learning experience? Do I have a picture to capture all those words? And then what image could possibly distill the complexity of school communications?
Ultimately, I think the picture changes. Class-to-class, hour-to-hour, kid-to-kid, teaching was rarely the same approach to meet the needs of the day. I’ve learned that School PR is similar. Communications 101 teaches us to align audience, message, tone, and medium. In the social media age of school communications, I’m learning that some things are Tweetable, others need to be Facebooked, and I guess I need to get LinkedIn to something soon.
Since my first career in collegiate athletics media relations (1997-2006) to teaching (2006-2014) to now, there have been significant software advances - I’m guessing my Aldus PageMaker 4.0 proficiency is less valuable than it once was. (Side note: apparently a scrolling ticker on your website is no longer a must-have feature.) I have experienced quite a learning curve this year. The lifelong-learner mantra I preached as a teacher has come full circle.
Although I’m not a visual learner, research shows social media is a visual game. I learn by hearing and reading. So today, to begin, I think my blog picture is books. As I pack and prepare for my first NSPRA experience, my goal is to create some more blog posts to chronicle our roundtable conversations and the conference as a whole. With good fortune, some motivation, and the right pictures, maybe this blog will live beyond the next week. In the meantime, I hope this space becomes insightful and interesting to those who visit. And if you have any ideas for pictures...please share.
*Credits: hat tip to Joe Donovan (@heyjoedonovan), Delaina McCormack (@delainanicole), Jason Wheeler (@WheelerCFB), and Todd Sanders (@tsand): all content producers and distributors worth following who have directly and indirectly influenced my dive into bloggerdom. If this proves interesting and compelling to readers, they share credit. And thanks to Corey Wilson (@WilsonPhotoLLC) for the picture of the books.