School leaders’ growing use of interactive networking platforms like blogs and Twitter for professional purposes has generally been welcomed as a way to promote transparency and idea-sharing and to model so-called 21st-century communication skills. But some educators are begining to ask whether, in the grand scheme of things, there aren’t much better things administrators could be doing with their time. School technology expert Scott McLeod highlights an interesting comment in this vein:
I watch principals or superintendents who tweet or blog a lot, and often I wonder what they could be doing in their building instead of that. In the blogosphere or twitterverse, there is a lot of self congratulatory back slapping in the education administration world with people who tweet and blog, but truth be told, the people running really tough schools (i.e. inner city, struggling to make AYP) don't have time to do it.