As a former sports-writer, I have been a fan of Mike Lupica for some time. The veteran sports writer for the New York Daily News is also a best-selling author of young adult fiction with a phenomenal series of sports-related stories to his credit. He will be in Burlington tomorrow at Barnes and Noble at 4 p.m. to sign his most recent publication True Legend.
Originally posted on the Connected Principals Blog
I am always looking for entry points for our school community to engage in a meaningful discussion of our vision for students. Will Richardson’s TEDx Talk from Melbourne, Australia (below) provides a clear description of where we need to be headed.
All schools need to answer the following question asked by Richardson:
What is the value of school when you don’t really need school to do school if we define school in the traditional sense?
Here are two key points from Richardson’s talk that get to the heart of this question:
I would love to hear your thoughts after watching the video!
Originally posted on the Connected Principals Blog
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| We won’t go wrong if we keep students the focus of our plans. |
I was excited to see the headline on a Forbes magazine piece in August titled – Why Public School Leaders Must Embrace Social Media Now. As I read the article, I was in complete agreement with the points that were being made by the author, Joel Gagne, a consultant who works with schools on communicating more effectively with stakeholders.
Gagne pointed to the following as reasons for schools to start using social media:
“Communications: Often, schools communicate with stakeholders via either regular postal mail or the school website. When a school district decides to utilize social media, their stakeholders can receive information like the “Principal’s Report,” event information, schedule changes, and more in real time. They can also use social media to listen to what many in their community are thinking about their local public schools.
Public Relations: Given so much negative media about public education, schools can no longer leave public relations to chance. Social media allows schools to direct their followers to newspapers and TV segments featuring positive information. School districts can also use social media to highlight the hard work of their students and staff, and their school district’s accomplishments.
Branding: Whenever someone sees the Golden Arches, they know they’ve found McDonald’s. This should be a school district’s goal through social media – that whenever someone sees their school district’s logo, they should think “innovation” (or whatever the desired brand may be).
The above are a great starting point in regards to why schools should be utilizing social media resources. But are these the most important reasons for us to start embracing social media? In my mind, these are low-level tasks that have been and always will be important to any organization, including schools.
However, the biggest concern I have with school leaders be unwilling to utilize social media resources, or even worse banning them in their school, is the fallout for the students. Students who do not know how to utilize these current resources to communicate, collaborate, and learn are not competent according the National Council of Teachers of English framework developed on 2008.
According to NCTE :
Twenty-first century readers and writers need to
- Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
- Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
- Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
- Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
- Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
- Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments
When I first heard about the possibility of an ISTE Leadership Forum, I was thrilled about the prospects of a conference that would allow me to collaborate with school leaders and share solutions to the most pressing issues we are facing in our schools today. As the October event draws closer my excitement continues to grow because I know this event will leave me with a wealth of concrete ideas to bring back home to my district. In addition, I know that the connections that I make with colleagues from around the country will allow me to grow my Personal Learning Network (PLN) and have an expanded list of educational experts to reach out to as new challenges arise.
Here are some bullets from the forum’s website regarding why individuals in leadership positions and leadership teams should attend:
1. Connect With Amazing School Leaders
First off, Chris Lehmann is the opening keynote and having the chance to sit down with Chris and hear his thoughts is an amazing opportunity in itself. But more importantly, Chris and the other ed. leaders who will be there (i.e. George Couros, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, and many others) are accessible every day of the week through their blogs, twitter accounts, e-mail, etc.
2. Michael Fullan is the lead facilitator
Michael Fullan is one of the most highly-regarded change leaders in the world when it comes to the field of education. I had the chance to spend a full-day workshop with him over 10-years ago, shortly after the release of his book Leading In A Culture Of Change and it is still among the top Professional Development experiences of my career. More recently, Fullan has published Change Leader, another great resource for educators to rethink the traditional model of schooling that is holding back our staff and students.
3. Leaders Need To Model The Changing Definition of Literacy
A few years ago the National Council of Teachers of English created a new 21st Century Literacy Framework. The truth of the matter is that what it means to be literate in 2012 has changed a great deal from when many educators were in school themselves. In order for us to truly fulfill our role as instructional leaders, we need to understand this shift and become comfortable with this new skill-set and model it for staff, students, (and our communities). Fortunately, ISTE has a set of clear standards for administrators, teachers, and students to help us in this critical work.
For all of these reasons, I feel the ISTE Leadership Forum will be my most important Professional Development this year. I will have the opportunity to continue to expand my vision and goals for myself and my school and ensure that we are on the right track in providing our students with the most relevant educational experience possible.
Thank you ISTE for making this event a reality! Please spread the word to other educators in leadership positions. This is something that they will be sorry they missed!
As we move into our second year as a Google Apps school, we continue to offer a number of professional development sessions to help teachers make the move away from Microsoft Office and saving documents on our network. These two options will no longer be supported as we move into the 2012-2013 school year.
The book below is another great resource from Richard Byrne’s Free Technology for Teachers website that can also help staff make this transition.
Google Drive and Docs for Teachers 2012http://www.scribd.com/embeds/92629651/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-wcpitfebq2fjs7ft73e
Also posted on the Burlington New Teachers Blog:
One of the keys to success for educators is ensuring a high level of communication between staff and students (and parents). If you are looking for a new tool to help you in this task, check out Remind 101. It is a great resource which teachers can use to send group text messages to students and it allows you to set up individual distribution lists for different classes. Best of all, there is no exchange of phone numbers between teachers and students/parents. As a teacher you set up the Remind 101 account and parents can decide whether or not they want to opt in.
Check out the overview of Remind 101 below:
The video below created by my friend George Couros contains step-by-step directions on how to set up your Remind 101 account. You can do it in under four minutes!
http://www.screenr.com/embed/naz8
BHS staff member Andrew Marcinek, who blogs regularly for Edutopia, had a great reflective post regarding our first year as a 1:1 school with iPads. It is extremely helpful for me to see the reflections of staff and students from the past year. One of the major points I take away from Andy’s post is the focus on trusting students.
Trust students.
“One of the best decisions we made before we deployed 1000+ iPads to our student body was to create a student-run genius bar. With this decision, we were putting a lot of trust in the hands of our students. However, it turned out to be a core component of the launch…
…Aside from simply troubleshooting, our students help their former teachers at the middle and elementary levels as well as create how-to scripts and videos for students, faculty and the Burlington community. Our students have not only helped within the BPS community, but have helped our Tech Team organize two major conferences in the past year…”
Beyond the student help desk, I think the trust of students in regards to access of social media sites and other apps and sites that can be used for non-educational purposes allowed our efforts to focus more on supporting educational uses of the technology. We did not go into this undertaking with a mindset of blocking and denying access.
We went into this with a mindset that we are preparing our students for life after school where they are going to have to know how to make choices about appropriate use of apps and sites that do not apply to their work. We felt strongly that the conversations that need to take place and the authentic experience of making choices about what to access and when to access it is not something that can be replicated with theoretical conversations.
As an organization, we do not feel we can have the type of learning and interactions between learners that we envision if our default reaction is that the individuals who inhabit our school will choose to do the wrong thing.
We trust teachers and we trust students. Then on the rare occasion that someone misuses that trust, we address the situation with that individual. Should it happen any other way?
Related articles
I started a new blog to share information and resources with our new teachers in Burlington. The initial post is below. Please check out the Burlington New Teachers Blog when you have a chance.
The initial post from our first meeting is below:
Thanks again to all of the new teachers who took part in today’s new teacher orientation. We are so excited that you chose BPS and we look forward to supporting you as you work with our students. We hope that you will find that Burlington is a place where you can feel comfortable continuing to take risks and grow as a learner. Because if our teachers do not feel this way, we will also rob our students of the opportunity to reach their full potential.
Get Connected
We encourage you to take advantage of the resources you have available to connect and collaborate with educators both within and outside of our school district. The United States Department of Education as designated August as Connected Educator Month and there are a number of great resources available at the Connected Educator website.
There are a few ways you can get started. The easiest way is to start following this blog. Please enter your e-mail address in the box on the righthand side of the blog. This will ensure that you get a daily e-mail with any new blog posts from the BPS New Teacher Blog. that you can get started. You can also use your google account to start following blogs through Google Reader which you can access under the more tab at the top of the page when you log into your Google account. We’ll talk more about this soon!
Finally, I encourage you to join Twitter and start connecting and sharing with other educators all over the world. Here is a link to a document to help you get started that was originally created by George Couros (a friend who is an administrator in Alberta, Canada). Please be sure to pay special attention to the following hashtags #bpschat (Burlington Public Schools Chat), #ntchat (new teacher chat), and #1st5days (a conversation for getting your year off to a great start).
As I mentioned I will also lead a session on getting started with Twitter during next week’s opening Professional Development Conference. You can access the entire conference schedule at the conference website.
Employee Benefits
Here is the employee benefits presentation that was reviewed by our Human Resources Director Joanne Faust. If you have follow-up questions you can e-mail Joanne at faust@bpsk12.org and her extension is 1774.
Teachers’ Union
Thanks to BEA President Diana Marcus for taking the time to meet with new teachers this morning. You can contact Diana via her school e-mail marcus@bpsk12.org.
Below is a copy of the Teacher Orientation Handbook
Finally, please check below for our list of dates for module training for our new teachers who have not completed an induction program in another MA district.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me at extension 1804 or my secretary Rosemary DeSousa at extension 1989. You can also contact me on Twitter @PatrickMLarkin or call me on my Google Voice number at (559) 245-2757.
My Un-Learning Journey 