Category Archives: Communication

Reaching Out

Coming to a new school can be an exciting opportunity to implement some ideas that have been percolating in your head. Maybe it’s a generational thing, or a function of my own personal level of geekiness, but one of the first things I did after being appointed to my new position this year was check out the school’s website. I envision a school’s website as a “one-stop shop” for anything and everything parents, students, community members, or prospective home buyers would want to know about the school. When I saw what was in place, I knew it just wasn’t going to work for me.

I spent more than a couple days pondering how I would begin to make this change without being “that guy” who comes in and wants to change everything. I started by connecting with our media specialist who, also being new to the building, had no preconceptions about how the site should look. She was in and out of the building over the summer so we met a few times to talk about my vision for our web presence, her comfort level taking a leadership role in the change, and what she thought a middle school web page should contain. Lucky for me, she is curious and highly self-directed and jumped on board from the beginning.

The Goal

I mentioned earlier that I wanted a “one-stop shop” for visitors. I also wanted each core team (we have six) and the elective team to have their own site where they could keep parents up-to-date on the “goings on” for their team.

Getting Started

I’ll spare you the super technical details and tell you that I am self-hosting a WordPress blog that is configured for multiple users. My media specialist and I are the “Super Admins” and the entire staff has been entered as “Users” of the main school site with the rights to create their own sites underneath.

Because I wanted some consistency, I set up the team blogs myself. I wanted all the team blog domains to be conballms.org/teamname without exception. I wanted to make sure that the Tiger team, for instance, didn’t call their site conballms.org/thetigers and that the Falcons didn’t call their site conballms.org/falconsrock. Other teachers who create classroom blogs have the freedom to choose whatever name they want after the conballms.org/.

I also chose to restrict team blogs to a common theme in order to go for a more consistent look and feel across the whole site. Teams had fun finding banner images for their sites in what almost became a kind of competition.

It took some thinking and tinkering to get things to look and act the way I wanted them to. Here are three plugins that were indispensable to me when I was getting things up and running.

  • Import Users by Dagon Design. This plugin allows you to use a big, CSV file to batch create all of your users. Useful if you plan to have more than 5 or 6 people as members of your blog.
  • Unfiltered MU. On multi-user installs, your user-created blogs aren’t allowed to post embed code for things like YouTube videos and the like. This plugin overrides this “feature” at your own peril.
  • Subscribe2. The deal-breaker. This was how I covered the issue of parents who still wanted a regular email. This plugin allows readers to enter their email address and be subscribed to all of your posts.

I hope that you find at least one or two of those useful and that it saves you hours of scouring the web for the solutions to those simple issues.

The Sell

It was actually easier than I ever thought it would be to get teachers on board. In the past, teams would send out a weekly newsletter via email to a mailing list of parents whose addresses were (manually) collected at Back-to-School Night or Parent-Teacher Conferences. It was a model that made the team leader the “list manager” and “editor-in-chief.” Email addresses had to be entered, updated, changed, or deleted, and “articles” from team members had to be emailed to the team leader, copied, pasted, and formatted into the team newsletter.

At a team leader meeting during my transition into the building, I asked simply, “How is that working so far?” Most responses were lukewarm, citing the management issues already mentioned. By this time, I had already put into place our school site and many of them had commented that they really liked it. I mentioned that I would love it if every team had their own team blog instead of sending weekly emails.

I have an expectation that our core academic teams post at least one update per week and I have subscribed to all of the team blogs in my Google Reader. So far, this has worked extremely well for the core teams. I have to think more about what I expect from the elective teams, but I like what we have going so far.

The Verdict

The response from parents has been overwhelmingly positive. I introduced the site formally during our BTS Night in August and invited them to email me if there was something else they’d like to see on the front page. Many have taken me up on it and since the start of the year I’ve added our lunch schedule, the number for the nurse’s office, and some static info that is commonly requested such as the link to order a yearbook. My front office staff listens for common questions from parents and I make sure that the answers get posted.

My media specialist has stepped up in a huge way. From a slightly tentative user, to someone who enjoys posting pictures and wants to learn more about WordPress.

Overall, I am pleased with this contemporary way of reaching out to parents and our community.

What’s next?

I’ve been inspired by this post by Eric Sheninger, but I am being careful not to bite off too much, too fast. I’d like to get better about regular posts to our Twitter feed, finish rolling out a Facebook page, and start next year by committing to posting monthly principal reports like the one he models. Thanks, Eric, for being one of the most consistent sharers of concrete, actionable advice for principals.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank Tim Lauer for the extensive conversation we had at ISTE last summer and for being my “phone support” as I was putting my school site together.

Still to Come!

In a future post, I’ll blog a bit about how I stopped sending emails to the entire staff and began the year, cold-turkey, using an internal staff blog instead.

Meeting to Meet

I know this will come as a huge shock, but most people despise meetings. When I ask staff about things that are holding them back, almost to a person they have said, “Too many meetings.”

When it comes right down to it, though, these are rituals that are deeply ingrained in the culture of our school. Most schools have a similar situation.

Long, low-energy meetings tend to distract and mute the day. – Martin Fowler

The trouble with throwing out meetings completely is that they do have some value. According to a few papers summarized here, meetings can help achieve the following:

  • Shared commitment
  • Communicate daily status, progress, and plans to the team and any observers
  • Identify obstacles so that the team can take steps to remove them
  • Set direction and focus
  • Build a team

Being a new leader and getting to know my staff, I’m not willing to cut out all meetings. But what I am committed to doing is making sure that every minute we spend in some kind of meeting serves to move forward the school’s mission and agenda.

Zero-Based Meeting Budgeting We’re going to get back to basics. At the first regular, monthly meeting of our leadership team, we will remove every meeting from our calendars and begin adding back in those meetings that make sense and will move us toward our goals. We will no longer meet four times per month if we can accomplish the same objective in two highly-productive, focused meetings.

Less meeting time focused on dissemination of information Since my first day on the job, I’ve made some changes that I hope will whittle down the sheer volume of meeting time. Depending on the sensitivity, items that are “information only” in nature go into an email to team leaders or onto our school blog or wiki. Weening people off email has gone well so far, in no small part thanks to my very flexible group of teacher leaders who have been willing to jump into some new ways of doing business.

Two things I’ve learned in trying to bring this level of change to the day-to-day business of an organization are (1) stop trying to use the “inducement” approach to improving processes and systems (see letter B of Scott’s post on RSS for PD), and (2) stop asking questions like “Do you use Google Docs?” in favor of questions like, “To which email address should I send the invite for this document we’re working on?” It’s all about positive presuppositions. Of course we’re using Google Docs! I mean, who isn’t?

I’ll let you know how it goes, but it’s a start! Look for an upcoming post with more detail on the process of paper-reduction in a 40-year-old middle school.

Interesting reads I plan to share with the team:

Technology and Plumbing

I think some of us — for fear of being perceived as fundamentalist technology apologists — feel the need to qualify statements about particular hardware or software with the phrase, “It’s not about the technology…”

I should know. I’m one of them.

It’s about the learning, certainly. And the technology that supports that learning. But if the goal is to create a collaborative, networked space for learning then technology and the Internet are necessary catalysts.

I’ve become increasingly reliant on certain online tools to get things done at and away from my desk. From my task list in Remember the Milk to our Web-enabled classroom walk-through instrument to the Google Docs I use to collaborate with colleagues, sometimes the best solution requires Web access.

I, for one, am spoiled. I’m so used to ubiquitous access to the web whenever and wherever I need it that I take for granted that it will always just be there. I’m stopping short of an of existential crisis here; I’m not “re-evaluating” my choice of tools. I like my tools and they work for me 99.9% of the time.

I’m just pointing out how amazing it is that in a relatively short time we’ve come to a place where, when the technology doesn’t work as intended, we’re paralyzed.

tweet

I know. I’m hilarious. But it’s a good question, right? We wouldn’t think of keeping campus open if the indoor plumbing suddenly stopped working, would we?

Argue all you want that we shouldn’t be so dependent on tools that live “in the cloud,” but having access to them has become de rigueur in my world.

This begs the question (for me, at least…) of how this little temporary outage affected our students. Was it business as usual, or were classes interrupted by the inability to access resources? This certainly isn’t a value judgment — there are fantastic traditional lessons and really horrendous online ones — more of a general wondering. If technology tools have become as embedded as we’d like them to be, I would hope this would be evidenced by at least some disruption in the day’s activities.

If class had been temporarily shut down due to lack of online resources, think of the amazing teachable moment. What better opportunity to make sure students have the interpersonal, social tools they need to collaborate with people who happen to be in the same room.

Subtle Differences

I had the good fortune of listening to one of my favorite educators talk to a group of pre-service teachers about discipline and classroom management. I asked her to give this talk because she deals with some of our most challenging students, yet has very few attendance problems and almost never has a discipline issue.

I don’t even think she realized the power of what she said this morning because she kind of glossed right over it, but she told the soon-to-be teachers that as soon she sees a possible attendance issue emerging with a student, she will pull him or her aside and say (in her best tough-love delivery):

You know if you get to six absences, you and I are going to have a talk.

Consider just for a minute the difference between a statement like that and:

You know if you get to six absences, I’m going to send you to your administrator.

The difference is subtle, but it’s there. If you’re a student, one of those says, “We are going to work this out,” and the other one says, “I’m going to make you someone else’s problem.”

Guess how many of her kids get to six absences.

On-Demand Personal (and Professional?) Development

As a PhD student I spend too much of my time pondering what topic I’ll eventually tackle for The Dissertation. Naturally, I’m interested in leadership and leadership development, but I’m also interested in learning. Specifically, the way we learn when we leverage the power of collaborative technologies that, right now, we’re barely even scratching the surface of. How do these technologies empower educators to educate and, maybe more importantly, to be educated.

Most of the learning that I see happening online occurs in what have come to collectively be called “Personal Learning Networks.”

Coffee Talk

I’ve wrestled quite a bit lately with this idea of a Personal Learning Network (or “PLN”). While creating a PLN is all the rage, discounting their significance could be grounds for excommunication (twexcommunication?). Initially, I wondered how this had any sound, educational value as it seemed to me akin to meeting some friends at the local coffee joint, talking a little about work and a little about the Broncos and calling it professional development.

But then it struck me exactly how many times I’ve done exactly that. And how many times I’ve said or heard someone else say something to the effect that, “Hey – all professional development should be like this!”

Consensus, Conshmensus

As with many things “21st century,” the notion of a PLN is vague at best. What are they? Do we start our own? Join one? How? What’s the protocol? To get some idea of how difficult it really is to pin this concept down, think of the last time you tried to explain to someone that you learned about something from someone on Twitter.

“Yeah – I heard about it from this guy I know. Well, not ‘know, know.’ I know him from Twitter. It’s this website where you can tell everyone what you’re doing. Well, I guess they care since they’re following me, but anyway – he had this great idea…”

If all of this is a little too abstract for you, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach has assembled some resources for people interested in finding out what the heck a PLN is and why they should care. My interest is really in watching these things develop. In the two years I’ve been blogging and Twittering, I’ve already seen conversations around social networking in general grow from the fringe, early-adopters (“Hey, this is cool!”) to becoming more mainstream, at least among forward-thinking educators (“I learned about this resource from someone on Twitter.”).

A New Era of Online PD?

Even though there is little specific agreement on exactly what a PLN is, I think that even the doubters may have to grudgingly accept the value of these tools when it comes to connecting with others to share resources and ideas. Has the time come when using Facebook and Twitter for a few hours can be counted as “professional development time?” Probably not. But as the significance of creating virtual learning communities gains acceptance by those higher up the chain, I think we will see more and more structured, high-quality learning opportunities become available to those willing and ready to embrace them.

Extreme Makeover: PowerPoint Edition

Ben Wildboer shows how he used some ideas he found online (including some from yours truly!) to upgrade a slide deck about basic Earth structure. His blog post includes an “Extreme Makeover” like before and after look at his entire slide deck.

Ben’s immediate observation distills everything I’ve been trying to convey as succinctly as I’ve seen it done:

There were several students that expressed regret at the demise of the bullet points. It’s easier for them to just copy down exactly what it says (of course it is, they don’t have to actually pay attention or comprehend to do that). How well they’ve been trained by their past experiences!

Ah yes. Undoing years of damage done by the ubiquitous bullet point. Challenging, to say the least. But definitely a battle worth fighting.

Go check out Ben’s slide decks. And the rest of his blog while you’re there. He’s off to a great start!!

Presentation blues

I’ve found a good theme recently so I’m going to stick with it. I came across this great blog post by “Speaker Sue” in which she points out what Blue Man Group can teach us about – you guessed it! – presentations!

Imagine your classroom (or your next professional development, or your next parent group meeting…) if you had a killer slide deck and you incorporated some of what Sue suggests:

  • Get your audience involved bing, bang, bing. Everyone made a head band out of the paper they passed around before the show. No one balked. Some got really creative. We all got involved and the positive energy – read: party – started. They pre-sold fun!
  • Design your presentation so that even your least interesting material is still compelling and fun.
  • Start and end with a bang. Drums are good though other options exist.
  • Be unique. Playing the drums is pleasant. Playing the drums while dressed in blue paint, with vibrantly colored water sloshing with every beat, is fun, funny and unique.

I’m not suggesting that every presentation you give needs to be a “party,” but I think sometimes as teachers we sell ourselves short in terms of how important the human aspect is when communicating with students. I mean let’s face it, if rote memorization was the goal we could all very easily be out of work. The textbook (or the overhead, or the slide deck) brings the content, but it’s the teacher who brings the passion.

Sue’s post really underscores the point that it’s not about the technology.

[via Patrick Rhone]

The “How-To” versus the “Why-Bother”

I received an email from Brian, a middle school social studies teacher in Boston, who expressed an interest in presenting to his faculty about improving his presentation skills. He wrote:

The creative juices that flow as I try and design better slides has not only provided a nice outlet for me in the weeks before Christmas break…but also helped me get more creative in connections I make to the material.

That’s what it’s all about! If you enjoy creating your slides (I do!), you’ll enjoy presenting them. And if you enjoy presenting them rather than making them just a bunch of notes that you have to “get through,” your audience will enjoy your delivery a whole lot more.

My enthusiasm for your presentation, which I shared with a number of members of my staff, has made me into the resident presentation guru in my building.

Nice. I’m glad to have had this kind of impact!

My principal has asked me to do a presentation on presenting at our upcoming PD and I wondered if you had some advice on how to attack it. My audience would be a frightening mix of the computer savvy and folks who refer to “The Google.” What would you recommend in terms of content? I could see the scope being very broad and touching on why design better slides, how to do it, where to find good images, etc. Or staying narrow and looking at the how part.

First off, I love The Google!

Second, and this is just my two cents, if you’re thinking of presenting on presenting to your staff, you need to provide the context. If that’s how we should be teaching kids, it’s surely how we should be teaching adults.

I didn’t look at my presentation to staff as a “How-To” with respect to PowerPoint (although that’s what some of them came to the session expecting…), I planned it as a “Why-Bother” with the intent of raising the level of awareness of what we’re putting on the screen. If it gave at least one teacher pause before they projected the same, tired slide show for yet another year, I felt my presentation would be worthwhile.

See, the “Why-Bother” actually motivated the “How-To” with about a half-dozen of my attendees. It put it into context for them. Rather than telling them how to do something, I shared with them first why they should care.

And it worked! They stayed after my presentation wanting to know more. “OK – I like how you did that. Now show me how to make my slides look like that.” They’re hooked.

A “How-To” without context may be everything that’s wrong with the way we present professional development to teachers, but that’s for me to tackle down the road. You know – that and this whole “global warming” thing.

Honored

SlideShare (share powerpoint presentations online, slideshows, slide shows, download presentations, widgets, MySpace codes)
Uploaded with Skitch!

My slideshow has been selected by SlideShare as the “Slideshow of the Day” and has been featured on their main page! This is all kind of overwhelming considering I created the slideshow to present to my faculty, then posted it to my blog figuring a couple people might be interested…

Then, based on some requests, I uploaded it to Slideshare and added audio figuring a couple of people might check it out. So imagine my surprise when I had an email in my box this morning saying my little presentation was going to be featured as the “Slideshow of the Day” on their main page.