Making the most of your 20 minutes

…technology is an accelerator of greatness already in place, never the principal cause of greatness or decline. – Newsweek, April 29, 2002

Last night I had the chance to give the media and technolgy department's annual school board update - my 19th, I believe. I actually look forward to these brief reports. It's a great chance to reflect a little on accomplishments and challenges over the past year.

In giving reports to the board (and via cable television to the community), I try to follow a set of rules:

1. Stay as close to the time allocation as possible. Our reports are supposed to be about 15-20 minutes in length. Much more than that, the MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) sets in and you lose support as well. I don't worry if questions from the board take more time.

2. Hit the big items and leave out the gritty details. I try to briefly describe the half dozen or so new and important things our department worked on during the year. This year it was nearly 200 Smartboard installations, the roll out of GoogleApps for staff, a student gradebook portal, and the selection of a new phone system.

3. Illustrate your report. Screen shots, diagrams, and pictures of HPLUKs help increase understanding, interest, credibility and good will. The fewer words on the slide the better. Hey, just like good rules for all presentations!

4. Praise, praise, praise. This is your chance to give a shout out to the people in school who you think made a difference in the lives of kids. Innovative teachers, hard working librarians, thoughtful leaders. And remember it is your department's accomplishments - not your accomplishments that you report.

5. Organize your report around a long-term goals. While it's fun to report on specific accomplishments, I've always found it important to remind folks of the bigger picture surrounding tech use in schools. Our long-term goals are below and are more fully developed here: Maslow and Motherboards: A Hierarchical View of Technology Planning. Multimedia Schools, Jan/Feb 2003

6. Tackle one topic in a bit more depth. This year I took a few minutes to report on a survey of Smartboard users in the district. The results were interesting and informative. (The GoogleApps Forms tool is fantastic for this sort of task.)

7. Lighten up. Education is important. The work my department does is serious. But one does not need to take oneself all that seriously. A modest amount of humor engages the listener.

So there you have it.

Mankato Area Public School's Long Term Media and Technology Goals

1) All students will demonstrate the mastered use of technology to access, process, organize, communicate and evaluate information in order to answer questions and solve problems.

2) Technology will be used to provide the most current, accurate and extensive information resources possible to all learners in the district and community in a cost effective and reliable manner at maximum convenience to the user.

3) All district teachers will have the technology training, skills and resources needed to assure students will meet local and state learning objectives and have the technological means to assess and record student progress.

4) The district will use technology to improve its administrative effectiveness through efficient communication, planning and record keeping.

5) The district will have a reliable, cost-effective, and secure technology infrastructure that supports the learning, teaching, and administrative goals of the district.

Comments

[Todd Wandio]

Thanks for the wonderfully systematic piece on keeping it brief, important, positive, and light, Doug. This post can be used in many situations. I'm going to share it with my colleagues, and students, in terms of both content and structure.