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:
Top 10 Reasons to Create Little Free Libraries in Your Community by Tammy Mulligan and Clare Landrigan We often support schools and communities with promoting summer reading. We want students to continue their “readerly lives” over the summer. A few years ago, we were researching ideas to get books to students in different communities and…
New research by scientists at Michigan State University suggests that laptops do not enhance classroom learning, and in fact students would be better off leaving their laptops in the dorm during class. Although computer use during class may create the illusion of enhanced engagement with course content, it more often reflects engagement with social media, YouTube videos,…
My mom is my role model for happiness. She taught me, years ago, that you do not just have good days, you CREATE them. Throughout the years, this quote has stuck with me and has shaped me into the person I am and the person I strive to be. This overarching idea of positivity has inspired…
“Generally speaking, our lab is interested in learning about how kids learn to read. More specifically, we want to know how the brain activity of kids that have difficulty learning to read differs from those who are not.” said Elizabeth Sacchi, a doctoral candidate at Binghamton University. “Through some of my studies, I came across…
The teacher is just as important in a virtual learning environment as in a normal classroom, but a new study shows that boys and girls differ greatly in terms of how they learn best: Boys learn best when their virtual teacher comes in the form of a drone, while girls get more knowledge from VR-teaching…
On the cramped urban campus of Boston Latin School, high-school students grow an acre’s worth of vegetables in an old shipping container that’s been transformed into a computer-controlled hydroponic farm. Using a wall-mounted keyboard or a mobile app, the student farmers can monitor their crops, tweak the climate, make it rain and schedule every ultraviolet…
