Introduction to Educational Administration, Self Reflection
Ellis Melton’s “Introduction to Educational Administration” most important assignment, is a self reflection piece. We’ve been advised to follow the ISLLC Standards in this piece. I’m also seeing how far I can push the boundaries of self transparency. Instead of writing this in a word file and emailing it to him, I’ll publish this reflection on this blog.
There are some interesting hurdles as the paper requires us to have it double spaced and at least 3 pages long. I’m wondering how do you measure these requirements in a blog?
So let’s get started:
Standard 1:
A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the success of all students by facilitating the development, articulation, implementation, and stewardship of a vision of learning that is shared and supported by the school community.
Struggling with the basics of a conversation has been my life’s theme and I’m quite an expert at killing them even if it was a topic of interest. I’ve coped with in this by always insuring I was in a group of at least three people insuring there was always a animated talker in the group. I’ve found drama teachers to be some of the best specimens, as they seem to have the natural talents to draw out interesting conversations.
Hopefully this week’s teachers have been spared my special powers at killing a conversation as I’ve been practicing lesson learned from Monday’s lesson learning the 1st two items on
Since learning the 1st two items from the Admin Tool box all teachers I’ve been in contact this week have been my unsuspecting ginnea pigs in the quest to carry a conversation. While it’s to early to know the long term impact of this lesson, for the short term it’s made a difference.
Standard 2:
A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the success of all students by advocating, nurturing, and sustaining a school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning and staff professional growth.
Standard 3:
A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the success of all students by ensuring management of the organization, operations, and resources for a safe, efficient, and effective learning environment.
Standard 4:
A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the success of all students by collaborating with families and community members, responding to diverse community interests and needs, and mobilizing community resources.
Standard 5:
A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the success of all students by acting with integrity, fairness, and in an ethical manner.
Standard 6:
A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the success of all students by understanding, responding to, and influencing the larger political, social, economic, legal, and cultural context.
Admin Tool Box
Just started TCNJ class EDAD 525 Introduction to Educational Administration taught by Ellis Milton . All week we’ll be working on this Admin Tool Box. This is what we have so far:
Admin Tool Box
- Give up some “Air Time”
- Ask follow up questions: Tell more about, Help me understand, What the best thing you learned, Paraphrased
- Make, Post, use Org Chart
- Every document has a Dev date, Revised Date, update date
- Most documents are public
- I don’t know that, I’m open to new ideas
- More dialog, less discussion
- AB Fluency Review
- Think - pair -share
- Sharpen the saw
- Admit problems
- Develop a responsibility
- Post-it note consensus
- If you going to have a bad meeting minus well not have it
- “Prepare More ….. Meet less!”
- “Time spent on agenda building returns hundred-fold”
- “Agenda items should be detailed”
- 6 minute AB fluency review (A person speak on a topic for 1 minute, B person continues on the same topic and expands for another minute)
- Five Finger Survey reference
A Lazy writer writes
Almost two months and I haven’t posted anything. Well it’s better to write a little bit than nothing. At this point in time, I’m taking a Law and Education class through TCNJ global studies course . It’s a interesting class as little or no technology is used. It’s a bit like an outward bound course for me. Just yesterday power cut out but it’s wasn’t a big deal, with the AC off it warmed up a bit but the class went on. Wireless at the school is a bit weak but an airport express plugged into their LAN has fixed the issue for our class. The school uses a proxy so I’m now learning how to route other port traffic through it. So far only web browsers and twhirl work. No luck with mail or Firstclass, I’m guessing they’ve blocked smtp traffic 
I Hate Wrtitng
I hate writing. Why the hell would I blog? Trust me, I’ve got a syndrome, with the fringe benefits of learning problems. It takes days to write a simple little post. So why blog? It’s freaky! As hard as it is, with blogging I’m enjoying the writing process.
It’s a bit late, but this is supposed to be an introduction. I’m not promising anything but I hope to cover a series of topics. People’s comments are generating incentives for more posts. Both Chad & Jabiz comments, are spurring new thinking about recruiting. I’ll write a piece sharing my opinions on international schools review, Skype, and blogging. In it, I’ll ponder questions around the Recruiting 2.0 concept.
Johnny Lee’s $40 Interactive Board is an impressive demonstration of cheap education technology. We’ll be experimenting with it. Hopefully it works but if it’s doesn’t, you’ll learn about the failures.
We’re also throwing twitter at everything in our school and seeing where it sticks. This will be a long term project, in the mean time our updates will be tweeted.
Still need to do my reflection piece from last week’s workshop, I’ve got plenty of material, just need to compile and post it.
The task will be keeping an up-to-date blog. Over time, I’m sure I’ll learn short cuts, maybe I’ll skip this writing process and move right to podcasting. Soon enough we’ll discover the results. Until then all the best.
Introduction | Comments (10)Baby Steps
Ever since attending Alan November’s conference in Boston, I’ve been struggling with his vision. Are International Schools capable of accomplishing his bold blogging goals?
Last week Andrew Torris’s posted a question asking “Can a school leaders be “real” bloggers??” Could they? I wondered, and I emailed his post to our Senior Leadership Team. Very quickly I heard back, they wanted to know: why and what void does blogging fill? Instead of sweating over an answer, I thought let’s use the power of commenting and posted these questions to Andrew’s blog.
Less then a day later Andrew posted a response “Why is it important for school leaders to blog?” Our SLT had their answers and this time we hooked one. Wow! it worked, he really wanted to do this. Pondering wasn’t an option, we kept it simple emailing two free blogging choices wordpress.com or edublogs.org
Two days ago I receive this email from our Deputy Head Master announcing his blog. I’m puzzled, it’s done? and he didn’t need our help? We’re the IT department, we need a reason to exist. Actually I’m happy for him, there is hope this blogging thing could work.
So in a long winded way this is a good week, a few days ago YIS’s first administrator posted this “Two Why’s (but not very wise)“. As some already know I’ve tweeted his post and many have commented. Thank you very much, as we all know it’s this commenting cycle that really makes blogging work.
Alan November’s vision speaks of having everyone blogging students, teachers administrator & even parents. It’s a bold vision and I wonder can schools achieve such a goal. Those questions remain unanswered, but at least we are taking our first baby steps.
Blogging | Comments (6)Technology & Learning
How is technology improving student learning? It’s an excellent question asked by my twitter colleague Andrew. It turns out there are more questions, than answers from this query.
Sadly, it seems it isn’t a question that comes up until after a school has made large investments in technology. Not to say no one is asking these questions, it’s just a minority view point. In a metaphor technology is like paper and pencils. Do we ask “How are pencils and paper improving learning?” and if you are. What are your answers?
Uncategorized | Comment (1)Animoto + ASIJ + JASCD
Before I posted a reflection from Saturdays workshop, first I’d like to show this Animoto video. In it, is the adventure of traveling from YIS to ASIJ, switching between buses & trains and a few pictures from some of the sessions. On reflection I wish I had uStreamed the workshop, but there is always next year.
I have no clue what the words to the song are. I’m just hoping it fits in, if not, it might be one of those items lost in translation.
Uncategorized | Comment (0)Are Web 2.0 sites Electronic Portfolios friendly?
This Post is for the Weekend Workshop happening at ASIJ on April 26, 2008
We will be exposed to several different websites, each with a unique purpose, all are platform independent, working on both Macs and Windows computers. We’ll look at a school which has Electronic Portfolio system in place. Preview some different services and also look at some neat new organizational tools
Once the preview is completed, each will pick a favorite, explore and try it out. We end the session discussing discoveries or disappointments.
Sharing & Beyond
Twitter is a mirco blogging platform. It’s one of the main tools used in researching this workshop. It’s a great tool for continueing our learning on this topic. Create an account and following many of the educators listed on my twitter account. My link is this http://www.twitter.com/brianlockwood
…and twhirl is a free application for keeping your tweets up to date.
E-Portfolio Example
Shanghai American School uses Wordpress MU for student blogs, a few weeks ago students presented their E-portfolios to their parents.
Jeff Utecht from the “On Deck” podcast convinced one of his student to share his experiences with his E-portfolio, he asks the following:
“if you use this video at your school, or if you enjoy watching this very personal experience for a student that you PLEASE leave him a comment on his blog. He took a risk (dragging his family along with him). The least we can do is leave him a comment knowing the impact this video has had on you and your school.”
Framework
Video, Collaboration & Graphics
Animoto is a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music.
For this workshop Rebecca has been kind enough in providing this educational access code: edu08
Rebecca writes:
“With All-Access you can create an unlimited amount of full-length videos & even download them. The pass is good until June 26th, but if you want to use us in the Fall or during summer sessions, never hesitate to write me”
Here’s an example of a thread used in a Kindergarten Classroom
and here’s a demo example of how to use it. School’s have free and protected access to all of VoiceThread’s feature sets.
Neat tools but…. why would I use them?
Evernote and my shared notes and some other shared notes from one of our History teachers
GetDropBox is not in beta, we’re limited to watching this informational video.
Hello world!
I deleted the default message that comes with this account and I am typing something quick and short. I’m in a prepping stage, trying to ready myself for a digital portfolio workshop at ASIJ on April 26th. Wish me luck.
Uncategorized | Comment (0)