Be of Use

I always appreciate it when teachers and administrators ask me "what should we buy" when it comes to instructional technologies. It's flattering to feel that your opinion matters, but it's almost always the wrong question. Here's an example. I'm presenting to a staff on interactive whiteboards per the principal's request. At the end the principal asks, "we have X dollars, should we be buying these boards?" My response was "what are your goals? How can the boards help meet those goals?" He didn't appreciate my response, even though it was the right question to ask. I feel like over my career a lot of money has been tossed around based on what's latest/greatest or there's money burning a hole in our pocket. Over the last few years there's finally been a change in a focus toward training to go along with major purchases, but that's only part of the problem. Even if you know all the ins and outs of an iPad, it isn...

Whenever someone thanks me for helping them, the line I often give them is stolen/paraphrased from John Irving's novel  The Cider House Rules... "we all must be of use." Since I graduated from high school 15ish years ago, I've been trying to figure out how I can best be of use to this world. I know I'm still working on this journey. My first attempt to be useful was in journalism, writing for the hometown newspaper, then the student newspaper at UW-Oshkosh the Advance Titan . I didn't see it as a career, so I moved onto the School of Education to be a social studies teacher. I never fell in love with that, but knew I my career path lay in schools. After graduation it was off to grad school to get my library media license, where I found a career that was a fit for me. Or at least for a while. As a library media specialist I loved interacting with all the district's students, staff members and families. I was working on information skills with high schoo...