Speaking at the American Association of School Administrators' annual conference in New Orleans earlier this month, Superintendents Clayton Wilcox of the Pinellas County Public Schools in Florida and Mark Stock of the Wawasee Community School Corp. in Indiana explained how they are leveraging blogs in their own communities to communicate with parents, foster support for important programs, and keep parents and students apprised of issues affecting their schools.

In an age when school district CEOs find themselves torn between their desire to interact with the community and the need to work behind the scenes, administering programs and making sure educators are doing their part to meet district goals, the two school district leaders said blogs are an effective and largely underused tool that, when used properly, can greatly improve the superintendent's relationship with his or her stakeholders.

"Our secret is to mix different things in with [the blog]," said Stock of his project. "A little bit of politics. A little bit of humor. A little bit of editorializing, breaking news, school cancellations--all that kind of thing. We mix that together, and we get kind of an eclectic readership."

Though eMail, take-home newsletters, and other, more traditional forms of communication still are effective, they say, blogs represent an entirely different way of communicating with stakeholders.

"We've reached out and used the blog as part of a single communication tool within a whole cubby of communications tools," said Pinellas County's Wilcox. "We still use traditional media. We still use the business tools--eMail, applications like that. But the blog seems to be a place where we can raise public consciousness. It's a place where we can take the temperature of the community...[and] where we have an ongoing dialogue with people."

Wilcox and Stock agree that blogs are a very rich forum for communication. Thanks to the online format, school leaders can use their blogs to integrate video clips, pictures, graphs, charts, and other visual clues to drive home important concepts. Whether the topic is school construction, student achievement, or year-end budgets, they say, the use of multimedia plays a critical role in the presentation of ideas.

In Pinellas, for example, Wilcox uses his blog to link to video feeds of meetings with building principals. He also reportedly uses Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a technology that automatically pings stakeholders when new features or content have been uploaded to the blog and links to the local television station, so readers can download relevant video footage about the school system. Stock says he's currently exploring ways to integrate podcasts and other audio-based content that readers can stream or download and listen to at their leisure.