Random Musings

Tomorrow I have exit interviews with two of the “uber-bosses”.  The first thing that astonished me was that I had to arrange them.  My office has found them to be very insightful and it surprises me that they aren’t routine.  Thirty minutes with a departing employee to discuss the good and the not-so-good would appear to have value for all involved.

So now the question is “What’s my final message?”  I’ve thought about it a lot in the past few weeks and I think there are three:

• You are surrounded by good people.  Get to know them; ask them for their expertise;  they will make you look good, help you anticipate pitfalls and make everyone smarter and stronger.  Ignore them at your peril.
• Instructional techology is critical–but you need to define it as what happens when a child puts their hands on the technology.  On-line testing systems are not instructional, nor are electronic gradebooks or resource banks.  For far too long, however, we’ve developed curriculum and then screwed the technology on top of it.  That might have been acceptable 10 years ago, but not today.  Today the instructional technology folks should permeate every level of curriculum at it’s inception, not brought in to add technology to a 90% done project.  These are the folks that see the possibilities and are not bound by what they know in the past–but can look to the future.
• Number three is related to number one.  People are what make a school system great; not things, not computers, not busses or desks or chairs.  Keep the people and find other ways to conserve.  Consider what and how our money is being spent.  Do we really need multi-million dollar on-line classware–when we could do the same thing using Moodle?  Do we need the software from the big Redmond conglomerate–when google docs does 100% of what we need–and so much more.  It’s time to take a true look at what’s done–and make plan to move into the real world.