Shrinking budgets! What is a Superintendent to do?

Shrinking budgets! What is a superintendent to do?

cross posted at TechLearning.com
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Chuck McLaughlin photo

In Southern Maine, the superintendents took action! After a county meeting, the superintendents asked their curriculum coordinators and technology coordinators to get together and see where collaboration would benefit the group.

For five meetings, spread across five months, this eclectic group met, offered ideas, discussed, created an action plan and went to work and designed a professional development day in the middle of August for county administrators. (Since most of the work was done during the work year there wasn’t an additional cost associated with this planning.) The group surveyed local administrators to see what they would be interested in, from a list of our suggested ideas.

With survey results in hand, a little bit of skepticism, the group continued with the planning. We had the normal questions, would anyone give up a summer day to attend? would teachers agree to be presenters for the administrators? would we be able to offer a valuable workshop for this audience?

This may be trite, but build it, do your homework, and they will come! We tailored the workshop to the administrator’s needs, we offered a workshop site where most people only traveled 20 miles to attend, we demonstrated the ISTE standards. You can download the standards for student, NETS-S the standards for teachers, NETS-T and the standards for administrators, NETS-A.

There was an audible gasp from the group, when a statement was made about the building leader being responsible for driving (and modeling) the change for technology integration and meaningful work by staff and students. The whole day was about driving this change and providing secure examples of rich technology lessons and what an administrator should look for during a walk through or teacher and lesson evaluation.

We talked about purpose and purposeful use of technology. There were over 60 administrators in the room participating in a technology rich day, all using their MLTI laptops. The survey results at the end of the day were full of anticipation for a new school year, excitement about taking some of the knowledge back to their buildings, and appreciation for what they learned throughout the day. A bonus, this group of administrators have their own personal learning network.

All the administrators joined an Edmodo social network where they can experience the continued virtual conversation. All the web 2.0 tools the presenters shared had a dual purpose, as the tools were FREE and something that an administrator could use when they returned to school. We will be offering two follow-up dine and discuss evenings in early autumn and early spring to continue the conversations and learning. Stay tuned.

Web 2.0 Tools used during the workshop day.
Wallwisher http://www.wallwisher.com
Edmodo http://www.edmodo.com
Twitter http:/twitter.com
LOTI http://loticonnection.com/lotilevels.html
H.E.A.T. http://loticonnection.com/HEATframework.html


To find more examples of other leadership initiatives, see the post by Dr. Scott McLeod,
Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Iowa State University, also the Director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE).

Leadership Day 2010 call to action be part of this!

I almost missed this call to post something for Leadership Day 2010! Almost, but thanks to my twitter feed I saw the call and stopped the work I was doing for my online class to blog. THIS IS IMPORTANT!

Last winter several superintendents in our county got together with the technology coordinators and asked several questions. With all the shrinking budgets is there a way we can collaborate and help each other out? Is there a way we can collaborate on professional development? What kinds of professional development can we provide our administrators as they are evaluating the use of technology in a classroom? Can we archive professional development and make it available across time and space?

Finally, the choice was to collaborate and design a summer professional workshop for any administrator involved in evaluating staff in our county, presented by local teachers who are already demonstrating the NETS-S standards in their classrooms. The cost for the day will end up as a meal and snack cost, the cost of the teachers preparing for the day, and the cost for the local school systems to have all their administrators attend this workshop day as part of the getting ready for school. As a bonus, the group will provide 2 follow-up days where the administrators will come back and reflect on their evaluations in classrooms, get additional training and most importantly talk with others who are doing similar evaluations.

Gregg Smith, David Saltmarsh, Susan Austin, Maryanne Minard, Marilyn Woodside, Sherry Knowles, and Cheryl Oakes all have volunteered to make presentations during the day. Several others, Donna Seiron, Chuck Mclaughin, Joe Schwartzman provided support and brainstorming throughout the entire process and during the day their help will be invaluable. This is all happening through the wisdom of this crowd, we have a vision, the superintendents had a purpose and now it will all come together- August 17, 2010.

You can follow the outline of the day, the links and resources and we plan to ustream the event.
Resources:
Link for the August 17th PD this is a work in progress!
Check back August 17, 2010 for the Ustream!