Brick and Mortar School sponsored blogs are hard to find. Not so for on-line high schools. I have chosen to review Allied Online High School, a distance education program offering on-line diplomas out of Southern California. I will compare them to Berlin High School, a building in Connecticut.
Both have bland and generic titles, but one is more useful than the other. AOHS has a blog that is run by Heather Brunson (I have no idea who she is, or what her exact job description is at AOHS), who seems to produce pro-AOHS news that supports the idea of on-line diplomas. BHS, on the other hand, runs an aggregator that displays content from high school teachers. There is a host of login and names that contribute content dealing with bus schedules, senior class lists, and school picnics. On the other hand, the AOHS blog has readily available features for subscriptions, including a host of reading programs like Google Reader. And like, AOHS, BHS has an auto-RSS feed button, which is probably the easiest way to subscribe to blogs today.
Interestingly, neither one have extensive comments, nor are they geared towards creating discussion. Both of these work as information providers, throwing out varieties of facts and updates to the world. But Brunson's PR machine is obviously an attempt to add dimensionality to the AOHS website. The posts aren't dated, and could have been written anytime. It's a incomplete use of the form. On the other hand, BHS updates are great because they provide a more modern use of the daily school newspaper. Parents can follow what students are doing, and check up on how the school day is going through this mechanism.
All things being equal, I'd prefer to build something like the BHS page, where blogs are used to update things that at happening in progress. I don't know if comments would even be necessary there, as it's simply a better way to throw information out there.
7 years ago
For some reason, I'm having trouble moving from a person's link to that page. Is this the one you looked at? It doesn't look exactly like a blog
ReplyDeletehttp://lmc.berlinwall.org/
There is another blog for Berlin H.S., but it is a listing, so maybe it is what you were referring to?
Let me know.
I'm thinking they both fall a little short of the potential as you indicated.
But deciding to have one as an information piece is very ok!! And there is a lot you can do.
When you say that neither one have extensive comments, I think that speaks loudly. The point of the blog is to get people to use it and bounce ideas and comments off of one another...to learn. As librarians we not only need to create a userfriendly and extremely informative blog spot, we need to do a steller job of promoting it!
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