Meeting with a visionary principal!
I didn’t know it could be so much fun meeting with a principal. Seriously, I really have great respect for principals of schools. A good principal can really be a change agent in our schools but they are faced with so many challenges…demands of time, knowledge, organizational skills plus a thousand interruptions during a school day that require quick thinking and flexibility. The job can take a toll on even the most creative and strong leaders. I am amazed and thankful that we continue to have so many willing to take on this job. Thanks Tim! Thanks Joe! I’ve been fortunate to work under some really visionary principals who shaped my thinking and learning paths over the years. Good principals know how to assemble a team with a mission of making a difference in students’ lives.
Yesterday I had a brainstorming session with Joyce Hooper, the principal of J.H.House Elementary School. She is one of those visionary principals. I left the school the year she took the job and while I haven’t had the good fortune of working for her, I have had the opportunity to bring weblogs to her school on a small scale over the past couple of years. She opened the doors of her school and welcomed me to try out this new technology. Now we are ready to try to put it in the hands of teachers - busy teachers who do an incredible job under similar challenges that the principals face daily. Yet they still are interested in learning more and bringing new possibilities into focus for children.
It was so nice to be able to carve a slice of time out of the day during the summer, when things are not so hectic. We even squeezed in a nice lunch and had time to really explore weblog possibilities. I had the opportunity to take her on a journey of many quality elementary sites like Lewis Elementary, Butlerville Elementary, Magnolia Elementary, Awesome Readers & Writers, Blogheads, Idioms Are Fun, NewsQuest, Literature Circles, Thinking and Writing Wrinkles, The Adventures of Jefferson Bear , Mrs. Britton’s Class. Education/Technology and others. She used the Weblogs: The Possibilities Are Limitless! to browse through several other sites and plans to get back to it. She was so excited about the possibilities that she is ready to have a weblog herself. We have a good idea for a way to use her blog to really involve the students with it in an interactive way - more on all this later. She even sent me a story that she wants to incorporate into her first post next year
We talked about making writing and thinking the focus with some quick write and thinking type activities that can be fused with technology/weblogs to give students/teachers a voice and to “bump up the thinking.” Lots of activities from a normal school day can so easily be used on weblogs like Think/Pair/Share, Blooming Questions, vocabulary “use it or lose it” type activities, current events connections to classroom learning, and lots and lots of other writing/thinking/reading ideas. She will have a new instructional technology specialist next year and she wants me to work closely with her and we think we are going to start with a few teachers and try to do it well enough so others will be interested. I think I am going to try out TypePad for this go round. It has some features like unlimited blogs and being hosted by someone else is appealing to me. I love Manila but I need to try out some others, just to be able to make my own comparisons.
Back to the “thinking” board…… More updates down the road…
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