Improving communications with SSIS Faculty

Dear Faculty –

One of the comments made on several surveys last year was a call for more attention to communication and sharing of information with faculty. Divisions have typically answered this with morning messages sent via email.

The advantage of emails is timely information to start your day. The disadvantages, though, are many. Incorrect information has to be updated with a second email, sometimes leading to more confusion. Emails lists are purposely kept narrow in focus to prevent spamming everyone, but then one division never hears what another is doing.

Last year, Molly started blogging with the Middle School faculty. We saw several advantages: you can subscribe and receive notices of updates, it’s a “one-stop shop” for information and news, missed notices are permanently on file for perusal, etc.

So, we are moving towards this as a common means of sharing information. The current set up has four blogs:

All School Faculty Blog

Elementary School Faculty Blog

Middle School Faculty Blog

High School Faculty Blog

These are run by the divisional leaders, and by me, but allow access to post content or comment as determined by the person in charge. All are still under construction to some degree, so please bear with us.

If I need to send something to the faculty, I will do so in an email but also post to the All School Faculty Blog as a permanent record. The principals seem to be doing the same.

IMPORTANT NOTE

To make it easy to access, these blogs are in the open, so to speak. Anyone in the world with the web address can read them. The principals and I will post with the expectation that anyone might read what we say. You should bear this in mind, too, should you chose to leave comments.

If there is something very sensitive to share, we’ll embed a link in the article to a google doc on our servers which will force an authentication check before the document can be accessed.

Have any questions of suggestions? Please let us know.

Mark