Too Much Printing!!!

My question of the day...how do we empower teachers to not print but go digital?? Baby step ideas are needed...I love Wes Freyer's post today about Digital Storytelling but I think I have to start smaller with some of the folks that I am working with.

All ideas welcome!! I am hoping that we can begin to get rid of so much printing and move to more digital teaching, learning, creating and assessing!!

From Fred D'Ignazio's Sparky the Dog...
"Cultural Blindness

We are not doing this on purpose. Most of us adults are not naturally mean, despite what many kids think. We really are people of good will. But we may be terminally blind.

As with any cultural transformation, the inhabitants of the old culture (the world of printed words) can't see the new culture coming. And the inhabitants of the new culture (electronic media) can't understand why most of their world is so foreign to the older persons they see everywhere around them.

Let's face it, we big people love books. We have spent our lives in the company of books. If you added up all the books we've stuck our noses into, you'd be amazed. Even worse, add up all the inches of text we've followed, line after line, page after page, as we've read books over twenty, thirty, or more years! We've spent our lives in "book school" learning this simple equation: KNOWLEDGE = BOOKS. And school is the center of this theory of knowledge. The specialists of book-centered knowledge teach in the schools. Their methodology is straightforward: If you want to know something, find it in a book."

Leaders, Technology Integration and Professional Development

"A new leader has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless ... someone's got to make a wake up call." ~Warren Bennis

This was the leadership quote of the day today that a colleage shared with me from his iGoogle gadget this morning. Being a technology leader in my district, I love the quote. Last night's WOW2 EdTech Chat had, from what I could tell, one principal attend. Melinda Miller who has her own blog. We need more principals like her. She also does a podcast with Scott Elias which you can subscribe to from this blog. My research on principal leadership for technology integration also found that we need more principals like them. AND, the conversation last night further validated these ideas by those in the field who were chatting on the topic of technology professional development. Many in the discussion were technology integrators or technology coaches and not building adminstrators.

How do we get more building administrators involved in the discusion? Some are doing it on their own, Aaron Steinly, Assistant Principal at United School District also has a blog for his teachers as does Tim Lauer, Principal of Lewis Elementary, but they are the exception, as is Chris Lehman, not the norm. I am sure there are others that I have not had time to find and sometimes principals discuss these topics on the LeaderTalk blog. I wonder how many building administrators read these blogs?

As a district Director of Technology I believe it is my job to help principals become mini-technology integrators/leaders. Afterall, building principals are (supposed to be) the instructional leader in the building. If we want teachers to begin to think about and then begin to practice changing their teaching and learning environments to more 21st Century-like styles, we, technology directors, integrators and coaches alike need to provide consistent support for the instructional leaders at all levels. Building leaders then need to provide a consistent message of changing instructional practice to their teachers.

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Listening, Conversing, Discussing and Debating...Which one are you doing??

I just read an interesting quote from David Warlick's latest post (1/31/08) "Unconference is anarchy in practice. He says that everyone was blogging and podcasting, but no one was listening." He was listening to Andrew Keen on Digital Narcissism.

While I know digital natives are touted to be able to multi-task much better than the digital immigrants, I am wondering who is really listening when they are multi-tasking?? I ask this because if they are really listening, they will begin to more deeply discuss topics and involve others, but is this really going on in our blogs and podcasts today?

Educators are beginning to have conversations about technology and changing teaching and learning. I think conversations are a start it must go beyond that. We must then move forward both with our colleagues that we agree with AND those that we disagree with in our systems to move conversations to discussions and discussions to debates so that the "real" issues get to the table and are recognized. While it may seem like semantics, conversations are informal and begin most often between like-thinking colleagues, which won't cause an irritation in the system (Wheatley, 2001).

Discussions (which imply the taking of action to exchange ideas) can begin to do that but must be followed up with debates (formal, public discussion of ideas and opposing viewpoints). If we don't do move to these higher levels of conversing and listening, I'm not sure that we will ever move beyond the conversation to fundamentally change educational systems and create what we are all conversing about...an educational revolution that embraces 21st Century teaching and learning.

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Technology Applications in Educational Leadership

This evening I will be speaking in Dr. Ron Musoleno's graduate classroom at Penn State Great Valley on the topic of technology applications in educational leadership. As my research was on the topic of principal leadership for technology integration, I believe this course is essential to all potential incoming administrators so I feel very fortunate to be able to share some of what I have discovered, discuss and seek to continually practice to these potential administrators.

In Dr. Ron's words, "[the] premise [of the class] is to introduce students who are in the principal certification program to some of the many technological applications available to them as administrators. It is also designed to acquaint them with instructional tools (such as the CPS) that they may encounter when they observe a class."

We will be reviewing classroom performance systems such as eInstruction, Turning Point and Senteo. We will also look at podcasting and some other Web 2.0 tools. To begin, we will explore two TeacherTube videos to set the stage and get these students in the mindset of a digital native. I will also introduce them to the conversations about School 2.0 (School 2.0 wiki) and Students 2.0 that were recently discussed at Educon 2.0, we need to get more educators, at all levels of the system (and especially at the administrative level) to get involved in these conversations!

to reiterate...revisit the title of my blog and my first post...changing the discussion! : )

Technology-ish

I think that 21st Century education is a constant balancing act between defining our learning goals and finding/acquiring/using the tools we need to meet those goals. Vicki Davis had a great blog post about Webkinz and education this week.

I also attended Peter Reynold's webinar on Tuesday and he reminded us to always try to promote creativity and innovation in our students. He had us draw teacups, so at my technology team meeting I had the staff draw monkeys. Most, including mine, were "monkey-ish." If you didn't hear the webinar, the "ish" might not make sense for you but basically what Peter was saying is that "ish" is a way of encouraging students. To that end he has created a product to easily allow students to animate drawn objects.

This product will do well to help us target ISTE's technology standard of creativity and innovation. Some of the first graders in one of my elementary schools got to demo this tool and created some Animation-ish movies today to illustrate dancing. I hope you enjoy them and all remember to dance to your own music! (hmmm...video upload errors...for now will publish without the videos...sorry!).

Many of us strive to be on the cutting edge every day. In balancing life, I have to say I think sometimes it's ok NOT to be and sometimes it's ok if you are just "technology-ish."

Entering the Wiki World...

I created my wiki space today. I called it web20fored and the first space is about Why Wiki's. I welcome any input on the topic.

Happy New Year!

In the past few days I have heard and read about how New Year's Resolutions are "planned to fail" because they are too broad or too comprehensive. Having started a new job, at times I am overwhelmed by all that I want to introduce to my teachers. Sometimes it leaves me puzzled and almost paralyzed as to where to begin. So, this year I have decided to take some smaller steps and set small goals. Introduce one thing at a time instead of showing them 5 Web 2.0 tools at once without knowing our goals and vision of technology integration as a district.

This week I (finally) found time to read the report Maximizing the Impact - The Pivotal Role of Technology in a 21st Century Education System. I thought it was well written. One of the key points that struck me was the following quote,

"We have different missions. We serve different constituencies, but we speak with one voice on this issue: We must synchronize our efforts to leverage technology to achieve results for every student and, ultimately, for the nation, states and communities as well."

This is the key point I will start with as I bring my technology team and my technology lead teachers together this week to discuss this report. I have asked them to bring one question and one idea that we should discuss further. I can't wait to see what they come up with!!

You can download the full report here.