What does a good library tell you about a school?

 Your library is your portrait. - Holbrook Jackson

... children in one set of schools are educated to be governors; children in the other set of schools are trained for being governed. The former are given the imaginative range to mobilze ideas for economic growth; the latter are provided with the discipline to do the narrow tasks the first group will prescribe. - Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities.

Had I any say in the decision, my grandsons would never attend a school that did not have a good library program.* You can tell a lot about a school's philosophy of education - in practice, not just in lip service - by what sort of library it supports.

A school with a good library:

1. Believes that education is about teaching kids how to ask and answer questions, not just know the "right" answers.
2. Believes that asking questions is a sign of intelligence, not stupidity.
3. Believes that kids should have access to a diversity of topics and points-of-view and be taught the skills to make informed opinions of their own.
4. Believes that kids' personal interests are legitimate areas of investigation.
5. Believes that it is as important to create kids who want to read as to simply create kids who can read.
6. Believes that access to good fiction collections helps kids meet developmental tasks and reading fiction can foster empathy.
7. Believes that kids should be content creators and content sharers as well as content consumers.
8. Believes that it is important to have more research skills than simply being able to Google a topic - and that it is important to have a professional who helps kids master those skills.
9. Believes that edited, quality commercial sources of information should be available to all kids regardless of economic level.
10. Believes that technology use in education is about creativity, problem-solving and communications.
11. Believes that the classroom is not the only place learning occurs.
12. Believes that kids, like adults, sometimes need a "third place" where they feel welcome, comfortable and productive.

It's in times of budget cuts that a school's true values come starkly into focus. Libraries are a visible sign that a school is educating governors, not the governed.

Which kind of school do you want your grandchildren to attend? With what kind of school do you wish to be affiliated as an educator?

* Good = professional and support staff, adequate materials, articulated curriculum, pleasant physical plant, up-to-date technology.

Reflections on Rubrics for Administrators

The response to the Rubrics for Administrators has been, well, underwhelming.

Let's face it. As much as we all should care a lot about what our bosses know and can do with technology, most of us don't, really. We just pray that they are neither technophiles nor technophobes. And we help them as we can.

Sorry, Dr. McLeod. I have faith that you WILL change this mindset sometime yet this century.

I spent a little time with the ISTE 2009 NETS-A Standards, working to align my CODE77 Rubrics for Administrators to them. The standards are divvied up into these major sections:

1. Visionary Leadership
2. Digital Age Learning Culture
3. Excellence in Professional Practice
4. Systemic Improvement
5. Digital Citizenship

Unfortunately, they are so grandiose, idealistic, abstract and full of "change-speak" that I personally find them pretty much useless. I suspect the most technically-challenged of principals could, given the least bit of ingenuity, come up with examples of how he or she meets all these standards.

3b: facilitate and participate in learning communities that stimulate, nurture and support administrators, faculty, and staff in the study and use of technology: Ya know when Bob and I went out for beers last Friday, he told me that if you hold down the shift key, you can select multiple files at one time. So then, is that a great learning community or what?

I know I've ripped on this before, but when any standards become conflated, overly-ambitious, self-important, they loose audience, meaning and usefulness. Let's get back to tools that have quantitative measures, observable behaviors, and some degree of practicality for those of us in the field who might actually want to use them.

Bringing this sorry experiment to a close. The completed 2010 CODE77 Rubrics for Administrators can be found here. The discussions are here:

I. Personal Productivity

II. Student Information System Use

III. Record Keeping and Budgeting 

IV. Data Use

V. Communications and Public Relations

VI. Online Research, and Professional Development, and Personal Learning Networks

VII. Teacher Technology Competencies

VIII. Student Technology Competencies

IX. Envisioning, Planning, and Leading

X.  Ethical Use, Student Safety and Policy Making

Moving on to more interesting, but perhaps not less important, stuff...

Paper-free committee-ment

Every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty. Stanislaw J. Lec

Our district spends about $400,000 on printing ($60 per student) each year - and that doesn't count computer printers, just photocopying. The print-shop in my department which is supposed to be for "big jobs" pushes out 6-7 MILLION impressions each year (nearly 1,000 per student) and this doesn't include the copying done in each of our individual buildings (so you can safely double that number). That works out to about 12 impressions per student per day (2000/170). What might it take to make a school district, if not paperless, at least less paper dependent for both financial and ecological reasons?

I believe our adoption of GoogleApps for Education is a good first step. For those who wish to do so, sharing information electronically just got a whole lot simpler because of Apps. It's easy and fast to simply create (or upload) a document to Docs, then invite others to view it, either as individuals or as members of a Group. It's easier than using e-mail attachments - and a whole lot easier than printing, copying and mailing.

But how does one change a "paper-trained" mindset like that of a large organization like ours?

About all I can do, I believe, is lead by example.  I am going to see if I can't make the committees I run paper-less. What does it take?

• Using all electronic agendas, minutes and handouts ... and having a strong will to resist the temptation not to make paper copies for the meeting itself. OK, I know people will print agendas and bring them to the meeting. I didn't JUST fall off the turnip truck. Isn't this just redistributing the printing instead of reducing it? Sure many people will print everything sent to them. But some, perhaps a growing number, won't. And there won't be those extra copies made for those who didn't make it to the meeting. Oh, making these documents editable as well as viewable opens up a whole new means of group participation.
• Sharing information in meetings via projection rather than handouts. An LCD projector with the agenda, reports and activities makes sense to me. If people want a written record, they can use their own notebooks, scrap paper or...
• Allowing Inviting members to bring laptops, PDAs, netbooks, smartphones, etc to meetings. To access committee information and take nores. Oh, have open wireless access to make these devices maximally useful.
• Keeping a reliable and accessible archive of past committee communications digitally. Many of us of the paper-trained generation just trust paper copies more than online -probably due to early bad digital storage experiences. Both GoogleDocs, Gmail's large storage capacity and Group's discussion sections allow communications to be easily stored and retrieved without resorting to dead trees and petrochemicals.

When asked about the cost savings expected by the adoption of GoogleApps, not needing to update and support an in-house mailserver and client software is the most immediate reason. Sure, there is a little cost savings there. But what if we could, because of simple electronic document sharing, cut our printing costs in half? What if, by moving to cloud-based applications, we could supply $300 netbooks to kids instead of $1000 laptops? And when all kids have netbooks, can't we start to decrease the money we spend on textbooks by using Curriki, Moodle and other teacher-created resources? And further reduce copying costs as well.

Meaningful paper reduction will mean everyone thinking twice about how necessary any copy is to make. See below...

But hey, if one can't implent an idea like this during a budget crisis, when would it go?