4.5 Technology assisted school counselor and principal collaboration  (Page 9/16)

As kids will eagerly tell you, however, e-mail is “so old school.” More powerful tools exist to get information and resource to our collaborators either from “one individual to many” or “many individuals to one.” Let’s now explore a few:

Blogs

A blog (a portmanteau of the term "web log") is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog (Blog, 2011). Google owned Blogger.com describes a blog as, " A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world ."

The technology that allows individuals to write one's own blog is so relatively simple and inexpensive that it is no surprise that blogs have proliferated the Web as fast as they have. Anyone can create a basic blog for free, and most of these toolsets have additional features available for a price. Here are just a few of the services available that would be most appropriate for educators seeking more effective collaboration:

• Blogger is a free, automated weblog publishing platform in one easy to use website. http://www.blogger.com/
• TypePad is similar to blogger, another blogging service although this one has a minimal cost. http://www.typepad.com/
• LiveJournal is free although users can choose to upgrade their accounts for extra features. http://www.livejournal.com/
• Moveable Type is another popular web publishing platform and community host. http://www.movabletype.com/
• Posterous . This website lets you post things online fast using email. http://www.posterous.com/
• WordPress . Here you can start a blog in seconds without any technical knowledge. One of the authors of this article uses WordPress in a graduate class to have students upload clinical supervision videos, view one another’s videos, and comment with their observations. http://wordpress.com/
• Twitter . People are eager to connect with other people and Twitter, often considered a “microblog,” makes that simple. http://twitter.com/

Consumers of blogs, in this case, our educational stakeholders, have several ways that they can learn about new updates or additions to your blogs (e.g., see Feed 101 , n.d.). First, they can periodically visit your blog and look for any updates which is easy to do since entries are listed in chronological order. Second, if your blog allows it, they can sign up to receive e-mail notification of any new information. Or, third, they can subscribe to the blog if the blog host offers RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed capability which is a basic feature of today’s blogs. In this case, you simply click on a link that designates “add to reader” or copy the website address of the feed into a feed reader (also known as feed aggregator). Anytime the blog is updated, you automatically receive a copy of it right in your reader.