In 1989, I presented at my first educational technology conference, the Southeast Regional Technology & Teaching Conference (SRTTC), in Greenville, North Carolina, home of East Carolina University. I talked about FrEdMail and using e-mail and newsgroups in the classroom. I believe there were seven people in the audience. Very one else was watching Barry Adams with Apple, a master presenter and keynote speaker.
I’ve only missed two SRTTC conferences since then, and tomorrow I will be speaking there, to school and district administrators about Web 2.0. I’m calling it the New Web. My plan is to focus on some brief demos of wikis, blogging, RSS aggregators, and social bookmarks. Most of this will be covered in taking a tour of the online handouts wiki.
My main focus will be suggesting some strategies for using Web 2.0 as a school management tool for administration, coordination, community-building, resource archiving, and public relations tools. Thoughts are still assembling themselves in my head about that one. But I am pretty sure about these new applications being used as life-long-learning tools for professional educators, and I’ll be pointing the audience to the work of George Siemens and his work on connectivism.
I’ll also be mentioning the work of some blogging education administrators, include the following:
- Tim Lauer (Principal) — Education/Technology
- Tim Tyson (Principal) — Desk of Dr. Tyson
- Clayton Wilcox (Superintendent) — The Classroom
- Joe Poletti (Director of Technology) — Haulin’ ‘Net 2006
Do you know of other blogging school or district administrators, who are writing within the context of their administrative duties. I know of many who are blogging as visionary educators, and I may need to include them as well. What do you think?
Also, If you have any insights about education administrators using blogging as a job tool, please write about it in your blogs and tag (or include in your entry) admin20 and warlick. I will plant and aggregator on the online handouts so that your entries will become available to the audience tomorrow.
Thank you for your support!
Technorati Tags: admin20, warlick
David,
I’ve been thinking about this for the past few months — and I’m excited to see that you will speaking to administrators about using blogs and wikis in our work and not just as instructional tools.
I work directly with team leaders on my campus for the purpose of trying to institute Professional Learning Communities — the goal is that our department teams and our Smaller Learning Community teams (interdisciplinary teams) will function as PLCs instead of traditional teacher teams.
Our biggest obstacle is TIME. Finding time for the teachers to meet, time for them to learn together, and time to explore new ideas. We have a very good master schedule that allows all teams time to meet weekly (I can email you a copy of our schedule… but I am also planning to post a copy of it in the resources section of my blog) — however, as much time as we have been able to build in, it is still not enough.
I am convinced that blogging and using wikis professionally can be an effective solution to the limitations of “time.” The biggest hurdle is going to be helping educators understand the nature of these tools so that they are used as effectively as possible — especially with teachers who are still reluctant to use PowerPoint or those teachers who can’t even figure out how to check their email.
As I have started using these tools I have had visions… visions of campus leadership teams collaborating, conversing, and learning together through wikis and blogs… cross-district teams (principals, school improvement facilitators, etc.) working together through wikis and blogs… departmental teams and interdisciplinary teams building curriculum maps, lessons, and units through wikis… Using opensource software can, if configured the right way, be an excellent tool for collaborative development of the Campus Improvement Plan (and then the work is open to everyone and can easily be tracked and monitored).
I don’t see this as a replacement for face-to-face meeting time… and I would certainly hope that no administrator would use these tools to ELIMINATE any currently built-in team collaboration time. I see these tools as SUPPLEMENTS to F2F time — so that the F2F time is more productive and constructive.
Good luck on your presentation — I wish I could be there!
Stephanie
Mr. Warlick,
I’ve recently read your book “Raw materials for the mind” and will soon read “Classroom blogging”. I really enjoyed Raw materials, it really is a great motivation for a young teacher to read your blog and books!
About adminstrators who blog, I would like to suggest Roberto Gauvin (http://carnets.opossum.ca/roberto/). He’s the principal of a K to 8th grade school here in New-Brunswick (Canada). He’s really doing wonders in his school with blogs and other technologies. If you can read french, he’s a must read (and if you don’t, it’s worth learning it just to read this blog!).
I hope this helps!
I almost forgot: he also maintains his school’s blog: http://cahm.elg.ca/
A very interesting read as well!
*sheesh*
I mean, I know I haven’t blogged in a week… but hey, we’re planning a whole school online! 🙂