Be of Use

I've moved pretty much 100% of my reading to the Kindle or iBook format. There are a few holdout publishers out there - Teachers College Press is the most notable one that I can think of. Odd that they publish all these books from the Games + Learning + Society folks and none of them are offered outside of pulp products. That's also the reason why I haven't read Finnish Lessons yet - although I see its made it to Audible (and I have one credit left for it!). Of late, I've been having problems getting through any books efficiently. I'm a fairly responsible guy - my kids get fed and clothed, I pay my bills on time - but I'm having a hard time staying off of the Safari and in the Kindle or iBooks app. It dawned on me, it must be REALLY hard for a teenager or younger to do that - focus on the task at hand when Angry Birds is a few taps away. I believe this only reinforces the need to put devices in the hands of kids for educational uses. Some may think this is a...

When decision times come around I like to say - If you ask people their opinion, then do what you want to do they'll be mad. If you do what you want and don't ask people their opinion they'll be mad too. Such is life when you're trying to get a read on where people in your organization are at in terms of prospective initiatives. In my last district, leadership decided on 1:1, then had a teacher committee to help steer the direction of the project. I joked with my now former colleagues "they could pick any device they want, so long as it was an iPad." That group met a couple of times and helped make decisions...kind of. I'm not sure the people who were a part of that group felt like they were empowered to make decisions. Personally I don't think they ever in the position to make their own major decisions. I don't think that's a bad thing - leadership had a good vision. I'm trying to figure out in reality what's the best way to get people...

Our iPad/1:1 initiative is just a few days away. On Thursday we will be working with about 50 teachers (another 15 at the end of the month too) to get them started on what our bosses are calling a "digital transformation" of their curriculum. My role is to walk the teachers through the nuts-and-bolts (buttons, swiping, double tapping, pinching...) of the iPad after the Keynote Speaker. Then after lunch my session is on using the Evernote app. I get about 40 minutes to give an overview on tagging, sharing, emailing into Evernote. What sold me on taking charge of this app is when my wife came home from a professional development session at her school about it. I never saw her so excited about something technological. The organization piece, where you forward emails to Evernote with the @ symbol to designate what notebook to send it to and # to assign a tag (already created) really resonated with her. As a yearbook advisor she saw instantly how she could make her inbox less of ...

On Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog, he shared two excellent posts. One on mobile learning  from Mind/Shift, the other on change  in schools by Larry Cuban. The realist in me knows that big shifts in practice, no matter what the institution takes time. The visionary and parent in me wants change now. Others people's kids and my kids shouldn't have to wait. If we wait, we may just be behind again once we're"caught up"...always a few steps (or much more) behind. The realist in me knows that what some consider "real change" is more just rhetoric that faces an up hill battle no matter the philosophy - like over in Oconomowoc . Something hit me the other day while training on the basics of SMART Board software. I had a nice group of teachers who were trying very hard to improve, but I couldn't help but wonder "are they already too far behind?" Am I training them on decades old software that we should be moving beyond? Did we fail as a tech ...