In July 2016, I’ve moved to the district office level and no longer work at a school as a principal. To make matters more complicated I work in a completely new district – most adults didn’t know who I was, and certainly none of the students knew me. I’ve always believed that relationships come first, before solid relationships the work with curriculum, classroom design, thoughtful integration of technology and anything else really can’t happen with fidelity.
Our students are our business…our bottom line…our revenue stream – they’re the reason we work in education and just because we work in the central office doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know any of them, or any of them know us. We should break the myth that the central office is the ivory tower.
I’m very guilty of this, and need to do a better job of getting out of the office and into the schools and classrooms. That is, until I get the robotics club to build me a virtual presence device like Sheldon’s:
A friendly robot greets me on Facebook. He’s dressed like a doctor, stethoscope and all, here to do a security checkup. So for the next 5 to 10 seconds, I wait as he pokes and prods my account. “He’s really taking good care of me!” I think, when I start to wonder: Are Facebook’s servers…
Human beings have an astonishing ability to learn, but our motivation to do so tends to decrease with age, particularly in adulthood. As children, we are naturally curious and free to explore the world around us. As adults, we are much more interested in preserving what we learned, to the point of resisting any information — and…
We are raising the anxious generation, and the conversation about the causes, and the potential cures, has just begun. In The Self-Driven Child, authors William Stixrud and Ned Johnson focus on the ways that children today are being denied a sense of controlling their own lives—doing what they find meaningful, and succeeding or failing on…
“This is nice, it tickles me,” Kaspar the social robot tells four-year-old Finn as they play together at an autism school north of London. Kaspar, developed by the University of Hertfordshire, also sings song, imitates eating, plays the tambourine and combs his hair during their sessions aimed at helping Finn with his social interaction and…
“Why can’t I be more like [insert name of your favorite speaker]?” When lawyers ask this question, it usually means they’ve been on their feet in court or presenting to potential clients and it didn’t go well. They felt anxious, insecure, unsettled — far from the confidence they’d hoped to project. Source: Confidence Is Personal: Being…
Microsoft has been trying to keep PC makers away from Chrome OS for years, and consumers far away from Apple’s iPad alternative. While Windows RT largely failed at going mainstream, and Windows 8.1 with Bing was never widely used, the software giant is experimenting with another low-cost version of its popular Windows operating system: Windows…
