Leadership

Project Tomorrow and Blackboard released Leadership in the 21st Century: The New Visionary Administrator during a breakfast meeting at the NSBA T+L 2008 ConferenceT+L (Seattle, WA) Wednesday, October 29, 2008. This new report, based on the Speak Up 2007 School Leaders Survey, examines school and district administrators' attitudes about technology and learning. The report highlights several Visionary Administrators who have more in common with students than with fellow administrators in terms of technology use and priorities for technology in instruction. 

The Pakistani Educational Leadership Institute engages Pakistani educators and administrators by developing and honing the leadership skills necessary to direct educational initiatives and effect change in Pakistan.

The Leadership 3.0 Symposium is a collaborative effort of the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA), Computer Using Educators, Inc. (CUE), Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership (TICAL). It is truly "for administrators, by administrators." 3 organizations, 1 mission - Educational Leadership for the 21st century.

Have you run across Brain Rules? It's a great book by John Medina that sets out basic rules for surviving and thriving at home, school and work. These rules have some interesting implications for the use of technology in learning. Example: For short term memory, remember to repeat. Repetition is one of the strengths of technology because you can set up a system to repeat concepts many times without getting tired or without getting angry.

How can you overcome the hurdles facing any organization struggling to change: addiction to the status quo, limited resources, demotivated employees, and opposition from powerful vested interests?

People tend to over-value their assets and ignore embarrassing problems. Part of the problem with Wall Street is that corporations still can't bring themselves to admit that most of the fancy derivatives and other so-called assets they are holding are worth virtually nothing. They hang on, claiming their businesses are strong and denying the truth, until it's too late and the crisis threatens to overwhelm them, one by one. It's the same with personal strengths and capabilities: people tend to over-value their abilities and underplay their weaknesses. As a result, they become complacent about what skills and experience they have and what they can achieve with them.

Last night was Family Night at my kids' elementary school. You know, that night when you visit your kid's class with the other parents, learn about the curriculum and teacher expectations for the year, sit in little tiny chairs, etc. Each parent was asked to sign the district's Digital Resources Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) for the 2008-2009 school year. Not a single parent read over the AUP; everyone just signed it blindly. Except me, of course. I combed through it because, as a former attorney and technology guy, I want to know what I'm signing on behalf of my fifth-grade daughter.

Creating online communities of customers and workers has been one of the hotter topics in business and technology this year. Whether you're on the business side, in IT, or are just trying to build virtual teams around shared goals, online communities are rapidly becoming a popular way to organize people and accomplish work in a highly collaborative manner.

There is a great deal that leaders can learn from Madonna and her incredible ways, including: How to deal with innovation as fashions and customer demands shift. Effective techniques to reinvent a persona and profile. How to bring a management team along with you, even as you face controversy. How to capitalize on success for the benefit of larger causes.

Some is not a reason to ignore the large-scale, widespread, policy- and practice-level decisions that need to be made to transition our schools into a digital, global society. Some is not permission to stand pat.

The ISTE Classroom Observation Tool (ICOT) is a FREE online tool that provides a set of questions to guide classroom observations of a number of key components of technology integration.

One of the differences between a happy and an unhappy organization is how well its structures and processes match its objectives. You can call this 'coherence' - a coherent organization is one which is organized and managed in a way that embraces its objectives, rather than just not getting in the way.

Bachelor programs contain elaborative coverage in various fields which are industry specific and growth oriented. Courses in software engineering, Game development, Information Technology, web media, Net working, are designed for current industry standards. Courses are also in International business, Accounting, finance and HRM.

Remember the old Monty Hall program Let's Make a Deal? In that game show, you could win the prize behind one of three doors. If you started by choosing door 1, should you have changed your mind and selected door 2, if Monty showed you what's behind door 3 (Tierney, 2008)? What has this to do with research? Well ... people are convinced what they know is the right thing and forge ahead with decisions based on their rationalizations, no matter what research indicates. In education, such decisions--especially technology purchasing decisions--can have profound consequences.

As we enter the main stretch of a historic presidential campaign in America, there is much that he can teach the two candidates. I've always thought of what you are about to read as Madiba's Rules (Madiba, his clan name, is what everyone close to him calls him), and they are cobbled together from our conversations old and new and from observing him up close and from afar. They are mostly practical. Many of them stem directly from his personal experience. All of them are calibrated to cause the best kind of trouble: the trouble that forces us to ask how we can make the world a better place.

...it's time for a shift away from teaching to the test and a shift towards challenging kids and seriously raising the bar. In classrooms where we must accommodate a very heterogeneous group of kids, there is nothing better than a computer and some interesting science equipment to let the high-flyers, well, fly high. There aren't actually many better tools than some well-thought-out software and hands-on tools to reach the kids who are struggling. Computers should be much more than Wikipedia access points and word processors.

Heading into the wild blue yonder of a new school year, we know that some things are inevitable. There will be more to do than last year, and less time to get it done. But what further developments lay ahead? Let's take a look at the predictions for the future of public education. Use the table of contents to the right to navigate your way through our 2008 predictions. Please tell us in the comments field at the end of every article, poll, and video what you think.

Being in IT and computing I'm fundamentally in the business of change. Instigators of change are essentially trying to make things better, smarter, faster, more productive etc. However, it is more than apparent that the majority of people in the world hate change. But why is that? The instigator of change usually has all those who benefit from the old way of doing things as his enemies and he has only lukewarm supporters from those that will benefit from his new way of doing things. Seems like change is a big risk will only a small reward. So why the big imbalance?

There is probably no segment of activity in the world attracting as much attention at present as that of knowledge management. Yet as I entered this arena of activity I quickly found there didn't seem to be a wealth of sources that seemed to make sense in terms of defining what knowledge actually was, and how was it differentiated from data, information, and wisdom. What follows is the current level of understanding I have been able to piece together regarding data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. I figured to understand one of them I had to understand all of them.

Integrity is both a part of who you are and what you do. It is about being true to your values, no matter what. And if those values are admired by others, you have the makings of a great leader, particularly in times of change. We often have two sets of values: normal values and stress values. In most situations, with normal values at the fore, we follow social rules of consideration and trustworthiness. But when pressured, our underlying stress values come to the fore. For many people these are more about personal survival and any thought of putting others first goes out of the window. Where that stress line is where we flip varies greatly between people. Some get selfish at the slightest discomfort, whilst others resist the temptation for a while longer. Integrity means pushing this barrier much further out, even to the point of self-sacrifice.