The oughts - a personal reflection

How can they say my life isn’t a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten? Logan Pearsall Smith

Today is the last day of the oughts-decade. The pundits are pretty much unanimous in their appraisal - it was a bad'un. 9-11, two wars, economic collapse, political divisiveness and incivility, shrinking ice caps, Sarah Palin's sentence structure, and a host of other tragic, unfortunate and dire events made reading the newspaper painful.

I do appreciate the doleful state of the world and the fate of many in it. My own savings tanked and our house value is not what it once was. My own retirement has been pushed back a few years. We have family and friends who have lost jobs, lost homes and lost loved ones.

Yet I have many, many things to be thankful for this decade and a person really ought to list them now and then, especially at the end of an oughts-like decade.

1. My marriage. Happily wed to the LWW since 2001. While we have our moments like all married people do (always her fault), but a stable and supportive relationship smoothes out a lot of life's other bumps.
2. Two grandsons and a third on the way. How could a decade that produced the world's two most perfect grandsons not be considered a joyful one? And they will have a new cousin to pick on in April.
3. Educated children. Unless I am forgetting someone, our children and their spouses picked up among them two AA degrees, two BAs, two MAs, an MBA, and degree in divinity. Their achievements give me more hope for the future than anything else possibly could.
4. Healthy family. Something too easily taken for granted. I believe a few pets were our immediate family's only fatalities.
5. Stable and fulfilling day job. While my job as a school tech director is never the same from year-to-year and has its moments of frustration, I look forward to going to work every day, I work with smart, interesting and caring people, and I feel my work makes a difference. And it pays the mortgage. I am always surprised more people don't realize just how fortunate they are to have jobs that offer challenges that prevent boredom.
6. Travel. This decade has given me the opportunity to see more of the world than I had ever dreamed of doing. Working with wonderful organizations like NESA, EARCOS, AASSA, ECIS;  international schools; and library organizations in other countries has taken me to every continent but Antarctica. I've been able to attach a few "tourist" days to many trips as well. Meeting people from other cultures has been a huge learning experience.
7. Publications. After having written three new books and a revised book along with beau coup articles and columns in national and international publications and websites, you'd think I'd be better at proof-reading my own writing than I was in 1999. Nope.
8. Speaking.  Doing workshops and giving talks still gives me about as much a thrill as anything I do and I've really been blessed with a full calendar of such work for many years. Thanks to everyone who took a chance on inviting me to work with your groups. You know you took one hell of risk!
9. Web 2.0 and PLNs. Despite shunning Twitter and not figuring out GoogleWave, the PLN I've established in the oughts has been the most powerful learning experience I've ever encountered. And I am very lucky that many of my online colleagues I can also consider friends - a great compliment to the flesh and blood friends with whom it is always so much fun to see at conferences.
10. Perspective and Optimism. At age 57, the body is feeling its age. The mind seems to be slowing. I am sometimes a little jealous of the young bright pennies I see rising professionally. But I also appreciate the perspective the decades of experience I can bring to problems. And I would say that despite what seems like so many regressive things in education and society in general, I am more optimistic about the future than I was when the oughts began. Today's kids, today's teachers, today's rising professional "stars," today's libraries, and today's technologies are the best that have ever been. The Twenty-Tens will be a great decade.

No one should ever lose sight of the injustices, the inequities and the needs of others in the world and we should all be doing what we can to rectify them.

But we also need to be more mindful of our personal blessings - those bestowed by work, by intelligence and, in my case, mostly by sheer dumb luck. I sincerely hope that each of you can construct a similar list.

Have a Happy New Year!

My toys - 2009

The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.

All in all, this was a pretty light year quantitatively for new tech toys, but the ones I did get made up for quantity with quality and usefulness. (I am a real piker compared to Kathy Schrock who inspired this post!)

MacBook Air laptop computer. I spent enough on this one "toy" to make up for a lot of little gizmos. But happily, I remain deeply in love with this light-weight but powerful computer - in fact I can't imagine going back to another model. My concerns about the lack of ports have proven to be unfounded (a powered USB hub at my desk works great). I check sometimes to make sure I've remembered to put the Air in my bag.

Roku. This small $89 black box uses my home wireless network to stream Netflix movies to my television set. Took 5 minutes to set up, works flawlessly, and the picture quality is about a good as a standard DVD (get my home Internet via cable). While not good for movie lovers who demand recent releases (unless you rent from Amazon for a high price), there are tons of classics that are instantly available - and at no additional cost beyond the Netflix subscription rate. Don't bother ordering the extra cables, and if you are in the market for a new DVD player, some now come with this streaming capability built-in.

Apple Magic Mouse. Heavier and less "magic" than I had anticipated, but still a good Bluetooth mouse. I especially like the auto-off feature that saves on batteries.

New home wireless router (Linksys G). I couldn't believe the increase in Internet speed after doing an upgrade from my 5+ year old home wireless router. Again, very simple set up and this model has a handy reset button so unplugging isn't needed anymore.

Mozy back-up service. OK, this not technically a doo-dad, but I like knowing my work is all backed-up out on the cloud. Helps us belts and suspenders people sleep better at night.

Reading glasses with built in lights. Not only functional, but stylish as well! Everyone to whom I've shown them is extremely jealous.

Hope Santa was good to you this year.

YOYO - staff development for administrators

The issue of the use of technology is 5 percent bits and bytes (a spiffy e-mail system that spans continents), 95 percent psychology and sociology (an organization that dotes on sharing information rather than hoarding it). Tom Peters

All administrators can learn. The Blue Skunk

Learning that a Google Teacher Academy for Administrators* will be held in San Antonio in March, got me thinking a little about our district's approach to helping administrators learn about any new(ish) technology. I believe our approach can neatly be summed up by the acronym YOYO - You're On Your Own.

Well, perhaps not quite. Our library and technology department just takes a less head-on approach. These strategies consciously developed by our department work for most our administrators:

• Setting examples of good communication, planning and record keeping using technology.
• Inviting administrators to all technology staff development activities.
• Providing technical support and individualized training.
• Providing clear teacher and student information literacy and technology competency lists.
• Serving on building leadership teams.
• Serving on district staff development teams.
• Placing administrators on the district library and technology advisory committee.
• Providing reports and updates on technology initiatives and budgets at administrative meetings.
• Helping administrators understand what they need to know.**

There are a number of reasons, I've found, that make "teaching" administrators*** about technology challenging:

1. Administrators have people. Having ready access to secretaries, librarians, and technicians, it's pretty easy to pass technology-enabled tasks to one's minions. (I do it myself.) Having the librarian develop the PowerPoint, the secretary access the finance system, or the technician do any software upgrades is a routine occurrence. One can reasonably argue about how much time we taxpayers want our administrators spending on secretarial or techie tasks anyway.
2. What is commonly taught has little relevance to administrators' daily work. Our staff development efforts tend to focus on teachers and classrooms. Knowing how to use interactive white boards, the online grade book, or clever Web 2.0 tools to make reports sing and dance will not impact the daily work of your average principal. As "instructional leaders," administrators should know of these tools, but do they need to master them?
3. Administrators have other priorities and other tasks than classroom teachers. Administrative work is just plain different from classroom teacher work. Work drives tech use, not the other way around.
4. Technology as tool for student problem-solving, communication and creativity may not be in alignment with administrators' personal educational philosophy. Or individual leadership styles for that matter. If the administrator is evaluated base on test scores, the most powerful uses of student technology use - creating problem-solvers, communicators and divergent thinkers may not resonate with an administrator. But they may happily glom on to reading or math integrated learning programs or data mining apps. My experience shows that anyone happily adopts technology when it increases the chance of his/her personal goals - people are not resistant to technology, per se, but applications of technology that do not conform with their idea of schooling.
5. Most administrators are middle management, taking directions and priorities from a supervisor themselves. As powerful as some administrators may seem, they take their marching orders from someone else as well - including superintendents who answer to elected school boards who answer to the public. So they have a limited degree of autonomy to set their own goals, practice their own educational philosophies, etc.

As we roll out Google Apps for Education here, I am hoping that, by example, many of our administrators will be leading the implementation charge, not trailing along behind. One reason that I felt good about making the change to GoogleApps is that GoogleDocs collaborative/sharing ease has already been met with enthusiasm by our Support Services folks. 

As much as I hope the Google Academy for School Administrators is wildly successful, I'll not push it here. (Out of state travel being banned in our district makes the decision easier to make.) And were I betting man, I'd say such workshops have far less impact than on-going, less direct means of building administrative "technology" understandings.

*Interesting commentary by David Jakes and Kevin Jarrett about this event. Thanks for the head's up, Miguel and Mr. Byrne.

**I've been thinking/writing about technology skills for administrators for over ten years. A former superintendent, Eric Bartleson, and I published Technology Literacy for Administrators in School Administrator, Apr 1999 and I updated my Rubrics fo Leadership in 2002. (I am feeling another round of revision coming on.) Using one of our own principals a a model, I wrote Improving Administrative Technology Skills, for May 2005's School Administrator.

*** Whether we'd like to acknowledge it or not, all the administrators I know have advanced degrees, an above average intelligence, decent interpersonal skills and leadership capacity. I believe, even if we are not always in agreeement, that our administrators act in the best interest of their students.

Image source: http://www.dilbert.com/