Education Blogs

President Obama is expected to send a blueprint to Congress Monday for overhauling No Child Left Behind and reforming the nation's public school system. Early indications show that the plan eliminates some unrealistic mandates, but remains similar to NCLB. Here...

Supporting innovation and continual growth is an important part of the job of an administrator. Seeking ways to model and encourage integration of technology, building a vision for the future and staying on top of new developments and research can be a full time job. The use of social networking tools in my professional life like Twitter, and Ning helps me access the information I need to do my job. However, I find that often when I am filtering the information flow that my focus is on tools, research, or ideas that will empower the teachers and meet specific needs they have identified.But sometimes we also need to ask what tools are best suited to support and help administrators?

Looking through my toolbox, I rediscovered a tool, which I would argue, has huge potential to organize and simplify my life as an administrator. There are other tools I use but Evernote is a game changer. One of the most difficult things about administration is the multitude of roles, concerns, projects and stakeholders we work with on a daily basis. Evernote works with all your computing devices and is a place to put all of that information whether it is project ideas, to do lists, expense receipts, business cards, web pages, notes from a meeting or conference, or a voice memo about a classroom observation. This blog post steered me back to Evernote and one of the things that really makes this work for me is the concept he mentions of keeping it simple by having a default inbox where everything goes. Often I am clipping web pages, making notes or collecting business cards on the fly and then I can take a few moments at the end of the day to reflect, tag and categorize. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Evernote, in my opinion, is its ability to search photos of hand written text, or of business cards. At the conference I attended last week I snapped a picture of each business card as I received it and through Evernote it was synched to all of my computing devices and I could search by any information on the card to find it again.

Every day is a busy time for administrators and right now we are looking toward the end of the year and planning for next year. Perhaps, Evernote is one way to make all of that work easier. What tools would you suggest to support and help administrators?

By Barbara Barreda

Photo from Flickr by verbeeldingskr8

A month or so ago, Twitter colleague Dave Meister (@phsprincipal) sent out a tweet wondering if any of the educational leaders on Twitter would want to attempt a "virtual" meet-up sometime this summer. Being a generally social person who enjoys exchanging good ideas with smart people, I thought this would be great. Dave threw together a quick interest survey on GDocs and over 40 school and district-level leaders expressed interest in the event.

Being fresh off the modest success of the Learning 2.0 event at my school, I volunteered to help out. We'd gotten pretty adventurous with the online portion of Learning 2.0 so I wanted to see how much farther we could push the virtual conference paradigm. Being that all of our districts are cutting back on PD money and that we all have other things we like to do in the summer, we thought that a virtual, half-day event would be ideal.

Dave and I spent a lot of time DM-ing and emailing and collaborating to determine an appropriate format for the event. We wanted a format that would provide a loose structure, but not too much structure, and that would allow participants to network, share what they're passionate about, and form learning groups organically.

After a couple weeks of planning, I am proud to invite your participation in LeaderCamp 2010 on Thursday, June 24, 2010. Naturally, you can follow the event updates on Twitter.

The theme for the day, "Making Things Happen," was inspired by this Tweet from Dave. We talk about change a great deal. For this event, though, we hope to focus on action; on leaders who are - well - making things happen in their school or their district. Big successes or tiny victories, we want to learn from them.

We've attempted to structure the event in the spirit of a Barcamp or Unconference. We are exploring WebEx Event Center as a possible vehicle for collaboration, and will probably open up the agenda-creation phase the Monday before the event. We will not be calling for proposal submissions or anything so fancy or sophisticated as we really want this to be as open as possible. We wanted to create a space and time where everyone is welcome and anyone can claim a session and share a good idea, a powerful tool, or a success story.

We've created longer session slots for big ideas, as well as a pair of 10-minute "micro-sessions" that would be perfect for showing off a tool that you use in your practice. We're also building in some "networking" time as well and working on an opportunity for participants to submit a 2-minute video on a topic of their choosing which we'll string together to create a session in the style of "TED" or "Ignite."

I hope that if you're a reader of this blog, you'll at least mark your calendar and plan to spend some time with us this June. It'll be a first of its kind event and I am very much looking forward to connecting with colleagues I've never met and sharing more than the confines of Twitter allow.

--
Scott Elias
blog.scottjelias.net

A month or so ago, Twitter colleague Dave Meister (@phsprincipal) sent out a tweet wondering if any of the educational leaders on Twitter would want to attempt a "virtual" meet-up sometime this summer. Being a generally social person who enjoys... LeaderTalk Contributor http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/LeaderTalk/

Inspired by another blogger's list of the Top Ten Things Every Graduating High School Student Should Know or Understand, loonyhiker posts his own list for his special education students.

To begin her speech classes' persuasion unit, Mei Flower asked her students how to fix some of their school's problems. She got some "pretty amazing" contributions from her students, but noticed a common theme popping up in the discussions...

In all three discussions, someone suggested that we offer more classes that would appeal to students.

"Why don't we have those classes now?" I asked.

And without hesitating or prompting, they would answer, "No Child Left Behind."

See, when even the students know that a law has a negative effect on schools, the government should take note.

With one week of classes separating his students from spring break, Hobo Teacher wasn't very optimistic about his chances to accomplish much in his classroom this week.

I'm not even going to try to fool myself. I thought last week was bad, but now we're not going to get anything done for an entire week. Their bodies are here but their minds are already doing beer bongs at their parents' lake house.

Teacher, Esther Wojcicki, explains why, for many students, lesser-known colleges are better than the best.

It was a wild day in education Thursday: *Read our story about HISD's investigation of Key Middle School, which uncovered charges of nepotism, financial profiting off children and cheating on the TAKS. *This story has fights over race, gender and...

Does chicken soup and apples really have curing powers? Get the facts.

Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy this morning issued a "clarification" regarding remarks made on yesterday's show about the Texas textbook debate. Those remarks led to a harsh press release from the Texas Education Agency accusing the news network of...