Purpose
This is a new blog that we hope will serve our KRMS community, specifically parents, but students and community members are encouraged to participate as well.
This blog is a long overdue promise made to parents during an activity night conversation on social media and students. The parents in attendance asked questions and shared their fears, concerns and parental practices in navigating social media for middle school students.
We had discussed how having a platform such as this would serve as a way to offer timely and two-way conversations on issues and topics important to middle school parents.
Often parents are not able to attend school meetings because of work schedules as well as hectic lives raising children and all that this entails.
Our goal is to get this blog up and running with weekly posts from a series of professionals (admin, tech, guidance, and nurse) as well as allow guest bloggers to share their expertise. Each blog will have a comments section where readers can add to the conversation and pose questions that we hope to answer or address immediately or in future posts.
The four KRMS employees who are committing to managing this blog sat at a table brainstorming names to represent or symbolize our blog. We wanted to make sure that it didn’t feel like a top-down approach where we do all the talking and the readers do all the listening. We wanted it to feel open and collaborative.
After dismissing many options, our nurse thought of symbiosis. The dictionary defines symbiosis as:
“Interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both.
A mutually beneficial relationship between different people or groups.”
This is definitely the metaphor that we were seeking.
Why Blog?
Blogging is a communication platform that has become very popular because of the ability to generate immediate feedback from readers. It allows the readers to share their perspective and directly question the blog author. This allows both the blogger and the reader to engage in a conversation that might never have occurred without this medium.
Communication using social media and technology tools is a goal of ours at KRMS. Our work is guided by ISTE and their student standards. We believe that our students should learn how to navigate social media and become proficient, respectful and savvy users of these tools. We begin blogging with students in 4th grade where students write a simple book review and receive comments from a peer. There are discussions on how to be safe, respectful and helpful with the actual blog post and any comments made.
Resource: ISTE. Used with permission.
I’m sure you have read news articles and seen comments that are inappropriate, off-topic and show no respect for proper grammar, sentence structure or punctuation. We are working with students to teach them that thoughtful comments using proper grammar will go a long way towards having their message be taken seriously versus a poorly worded response.
The Plan
The plan is to create a weekly post that will be available on Monday with the blog author on standby to respond to your comments and input. We have a representative from KRMS administration, Paula Mercier will be posting from that lens. I (Laurie Prewandowski) am the technology integrator for KRMS and will be posting on various technology topics. One of our guidance counselors, Kara Byrne, will be posting from the guidance perspective on the middle school years and finally, our school nurse, Amy Holobowicz, will be posting on health-related topics for our students.
We hope you will comment, add your voice, seek clarification and suggest new topics for discussion as we move forward with our desire to communicate, inform, challenge, be challenged and open a healthy, respectful, two way dialogue all with the goal of serving our students as they spend 3 precious years with us.
On the blog, there is a tab called Future Post Topic. There is a form that allows you to suggest the topic of a future post or offer your services as a guest blogger in an area of your expertise.
Thanks for reading this post. We look forward to hearing from you, serving you, providing our insights to you and working with you to navigate the middle school years in a symbiotic way.
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