Leading 21st Century Schools

Just finished up the book Leading 21st Century Schools: Harnessing Technology for Engagement and Achievement by Lynne Schrum and Barbara Levin. Many of the things that were discussed in the book were items that we have touched on in class, just talked about in more depth.

"The time is approaching when mobile phones will be as much a part of education as a book bag." (Johnson, Levine, & Smith, 2007).

Ugh! I never thought I'd say it but I'm starting to embrace the idea of allowing cell phones into my classroom. Of course there is always the issue of "how do we monitor what they are doing" but we've gotten into that discussion all semester so I'm not going there!

We need to poll ourselves to find out how much technology we are using everyday in our profession? Are we using enough? Can we use too much? Are we giving our students every chance to succeed or are we crippling them with our lack of knowledge or desire to embrace the 21st Century Skills? I know I have lost my laptop at school for some days due to a virus, maintenance, or for whatever reason and I am lost without it. The simple task of checking emails and communicating with the rest of the building is lost. Any communication with parents, sometimes time sensitive material, is lost. Lesson plans, power points, assessments...all lost for the day. Only recently did I make paper copies of all my assessments so if my computer is down, I can still survive!

At my school we use Teacher Web as our main communication route to the parents. Homework assignments, weekly planners, course descriptions, syllabi, and individual teacher web pages are updated constantly. Our parents check their childs grades via Parent Portal. Even the "helicopter parents" can be satisfied with INSTANT updates whenever a teacher puts a grade into the electronic grade book. A lot of my lessons are done on the Smartboard with Interactive Chalkboard as the program to deliver instruction. No longer is our school's monthly newsletter sent home on paper, it can be found on our website. The high school in my district offers on-line classes. This will filter down to my middle school this summer as I have been asked to monitor an on-line summer school math class. Technology is everywhere!

The final chapters of the book describes 21st Century School leaders as "risk takers." This leadership needs to come from the superintendent down to building administrators, teachers, students, and all other staff. We all need to feel supported.

Going back to a couple questions I posed earlier. Is there someone out there that is going to tell us whether or not we are using enough. These past few weeks in our class, a TON of material has been introduced to us, sometimes an overwhelming amount, but we've talked about in class how change can only happen a little bit at a time. As long as we keep in mind to NOT "bite off more than we can chew", I feel we'll all be fine.