BH guest blog by Yoram Samets, Founder of Jvillage Network
Religious education is changing, and the change over the next couple of years is going to be fast and furious. Technology is entering the religious school environment in ways that will transform opportunities for our children. As teachers and educators, one of the best ways to prepare yourself is to begin to blog. Here are several reasons to consider blogging for your school:
• Blogging is a great entry tool to becoming more familiar with the technology future. Blogs are easy to set up and enable communication and interaction between you and your readers.
• On-line reputation is becoming more and more important. The earlier you get involved with blogging the more established you will become and and the more successfully you’ll increase your school’s technology reputation.
• Engage your students and parents with relevant content. Blog about what is happening in your fields of Hebrew/Israel interest.
• Blogging about a specific subject enables you to become an expert in that subject, especially if there is limited on-line conversation about the area.
• Increasingly students as young as elementary-school age are blogging at school. Teachers have an opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of blogging, thus leading by example.
• Finally, being an active blogger allows you to build up a network of contacts that can lead to increased participation with your religious school. Blogging is a great membership development tool.
This all sounds great, you’re thinking... but where do I begin? It can be helpful to spend some time looking at other blogs, such as Rabbi Rebecca Milder’s Bite-Sized blog at the Community Foundation for Jewish Education. Consider exploring whether your Website platform can support its own blog, like the one Rabbi Denise Eger uses to write her weekly Torah commentary--or hop over to WordPress or Blogger, where creating your blog can be as simple and intuitive as choosing a title and template and putting your first post out there for your parents and teachers to read. From there, it only gets better.
