Working At The Edge

Make School Different: Digital leadership & Transformation

5 minutes that got me thinking…

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Watch this teenager school educators on the dangers of Common Core… (not embeddable on WordPress.) I’ve seen this video shared numerous times over the past few days on social media, so I thought I’d watch it. Interesting it is. Nice to see a students with the willingness (and ability) to communicate his feelings on one […]

Leveraging Social Media to Build Capital and Develop Relationships

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This past week I attended the 2013 PASA/PSBA School Leadership Conference and had the fortunate opportunity to present a workshop along with two colleagues, Michael Roth (@mqroth) and Lynn Fuini-Heten (@lfuinihetten), on social media and how we are using it in Salisbury. Participation in the session exceeded my expectations with an audience of 50+, primarily […]

Limited vision?

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I located this quote/photo on George Couros’s blog, Principal of Change. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to engage with a variety of educators on the topic of teaching and learning with technology. The above quote from Clay Shirky reminded me of the limited view so many educators have of how technology […]

Preparing kids for life after high school. Really?

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Why do videos like this one, claiming to prepare our kids for the future, always look like they were created in the 20th century? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5WleWAMU5I&w=420&h=315] And this video explaining the common core….there isn’t very much “21st century” in these classrooms, is there? I believe you can absolutely have inquiry without technology, but when you say, […]

Managing Digital Distraction

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The graphic below was created in response to some results from a survey we administered last spring connected to our technology initiative, Teaching and Learning 2014. A consistent perception over the past two years of surveys has been that a laptop computer in the hands of a teenager is a digital distraction. This feeling is, […]

Google Drive as cloud storage

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We have been using Google Apps for Education in my school district for about five years, under the name Falcon Apps. It has really become a part of the culture throughout the organization and has worked particularly well with our 1:1 laptop/learning initiative TL2014. For the past five years we have provided students with email […]

IDIOTS?

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As I was flipping through my Facebook feeds on Sunday, I noticed the following post from Fast Company. I see their point, and I do understand that the behavior of some people can be labeled with no other word than distraction. However, I think it is how we use the technology that is often missing […]

Making the Time for Social Media

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It’s sometimes a challenge during the school year to keep from getting absorbed in the “urgent” things that need to get done. Personal learning time is often the first thing that gets sacrificed. With the summer, though, comes a gentler pace that allows for more reflection and the opportunity to more easily commit the time […]