Below is the Prezi I created to go with my talk.  The first few slides are simply screenshots from the “Did You Know?” video posted everywhere across the Internet.  There are two short video clips I added just to play in the background while I talked.  The first are images of the various kinds of technologies our students use every day.  The second is an abbreviated list of the software our district has provided teachers to help with instruction.  The main points of the Prezi are expanded below.

Know What’s Possible. Teachers do not expect their principals to be able to walk into a classroom and expertly demonstrate every piece of technology purchased for a school.  But administrators need to demonstrate life long learning as a daily practice, and learning about technology is part of the drill.  Read articles.  Read blogs.  Attend workshops.  Watch a webinar.  Find out what is possible with technology if you expect to lead in technology.

Demonstrate Technology in Your Own Practice. Create a PowerPoint presentation for faculty meetings.  Email a report as an attachment instead of stuffing mailboxes with paper.  Update your profile page on the school website regularly.  My rule of thumb is this: If you want to see how engaged a principal is with technology in his or her school, look at their personal profile on the school website.  Some are missing.  Others are still dated September when it is actually April.  And a few, a blessed few, update their page once a month like clockwork.  It doesn’t matter if YOU updated it, your secretary updates it, or one of your student aides updates it. The fact that you care enough to know it is updated speaks volumes to your teachers.

Give Teachers Time. Teachers will learn to use new technology the same way kids learn it.  They need time to goof off with it.  If you purchase a new software and expect your teachers to embrace it, cut back on planning time meetings.  Trim back after school faculty meetings.  Instead, tell every teacher to find time to just “play around” with the software.  It takes a huge amount of pressure off of them to “perform.”

Train, Train, Train, Train, Train, Train, Train…and Then Train Some More. I cannot even begin to express the frustration teachers feel when they new technology is “shoved down their throats” (a quote from a teacher friend), but no one gets trained on how to use it.  My suggestion is that administrators use the “I do, we do, you do” approach.  Go to the training yourself.  Show up in a teachers room and ask to help.  Then let them do it on their own.  Let me tell you how powerful and easy this is.  Our district has just purchased Interactive White Boards for nearly every classroom in the system.  Some are Promethean.  Some are SMART.  If the principal would just walk in one day and move some stuff around the screen with a pen or a finger or a koosh ball, not only will the students be impressed but the respect of the teachers will go up five fold.  Lack of training is the number one complaint of teachers regarding new technologies.  And if you offer training (or you have a tech coach that does training) make sure your teachers show up.

Know Your Limitations.  Most of the administrators I know are not technology experts.  Some still think that turning their monitor off is the same as turning off the PC.  So when you get ready to purchase new hardware or new software, understand that you are not the expert.  Get advice.  My former principal did this, and I really respected his final decision even though it wasn’t my recommendation.  We were deciding whether to go with SMART or Promethean.  Three teachers went to Promethean training and to SMART training.  Two of us came back with a recommendation for SMART boards.  One for Promethean.  However, the Promethean purchase was going to be about $10,000 cheaper.  That’s not chump change.  The principal got on the phone and called principals from other districts who had both boards.  He had the SMART and Promethean reps back in his office for several meetings to discuss all the options.  He truly struggled with this decision.  In the end, he went against my recommendation for SMART boards, but today I think he made the right decision for the school.

Always Consult the IT Department Before Making Any Decisions. Envision that statement with about twenty exclamation points at the end of it.  I would love to put Apple products in our classrooms, but our IT department doesn’t support them and they cannot connect to our server given its present setup.  What a waste of money if I decided to do that without consulting them first.  Or iPads.  I can envision a day when every student gets an iPad in kindergarten.  But will the infrastructure handle giving out enough IP addresses to let everyone get online at the same time?  Will it be better if maintenance or the IT department installs the new hardware?  Where should it sit in the room?  Do teachers need a desktop or laptop and docking station?  Your IT department is your friend.  Use them.

Always Choose The Technology To Fit The Lesson. Never Create the Lesson To Use The Technology. This lesson was brought home to me at the Discovery Leadership Institute last summer in a small group discussion about cell phones in the classroom.  Lisa Parisi, a fellow DEN member, made this statement to the group.  It is so easy to jump on the latest technology bandwagon and feel like you MUST use it in every lesson.  Just because you have a PC and a projector doesn’t mean every lesson has to be put into PowerPoint.  You don’t have to build every lesson in a SMART Notebook or Promethean Flipchart file.  When the technology is appropriate for the pedagogy, use it.  When it isn’t, shut it down.

It is at this point that I would be taking questions.  Instead, I’m going to ask one.  What did I miss?  What advice would YOU give new administrators about being a technology leader on his or her campus?

One of the highlights of the week was working with Dr. Lodge McCammon of the Friday Institute.  Lodge (as he is affectionately called by all his groupies) is a genius when it comes to using media in the classroom.  He has a wonderful self-effacing sense of humor that turns his apparent geekiness into the King of Cool.

During the half-day we spent with Lodge, he introduced us to the ease with which teachers and students alike can create “paper slide” videos for instruction.  In fact, rather than demonstrate the technique or lecture about it, Lodge made a paper slide video to show us how easy paper slide videos are to make.

As a result, I have decided that the starters for our 6th grade classes in our computer labs will be done this way.  The first six weeks I am creating all of the starter videos, but my goal is to students create them for the last part of the semester.  We will follow the paper slide format Monday through Thursday and then let them type their favorite or best starter into Word as part of Friday’s assignment.

I was surprised at how easy it was to do.  Although we are teaching math skills to 6th graders, our starters are all language arts driven.  As a result, we are asking students to write at least one paragraph at the beginning of class each day.  The first week of videos don’t fully follow our instructions from Lodge, but I’m working up to that.

Typically, his paper slide videos introduce a concept, demonstrate the concept in some form, and then ask a guiding question for the students to work on in order to demonstrate understanding.  My first few videos end more with guiding “instructions” rather than questions.  As the kids get used to doing this form of starter, we will change the construct slightly in order to be more open ended for them.

Here is the video we are using today as we get this process started.

When I was a child in the 60s (born in 1958), technology was pretty limited.  We had 3 channels on the TV (sometimes 4 if you count the local UHF channel), a radio, and a record player.  Yes, those were the days when kids played outside with one another and the ear bud, if thought of at all, was a gnat that flew into your ear canal.

Kids had imaginations.  They thought.  They figured things out.

Think about it in terms of music alone.

When I was young, music was something we heard.  We had to use our minds to imagine what the band looked like.  We made up mini-movies in our heads that went with the lyrics.  Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds had a different video for each mind that hummed it.

Then came the Midnight Special and MTV.  Suddenly, we weren’t forced to make this stuff up any longer.  The band was in our living room in all their sweaty, long-haired, torn-clothes glory.  Video Killed the Radio Star didn’t just kill a star.  It killed our need to imagine a story.  And our brains got stupid.

Today, we have no need to commit facts to our brains.  Let Me Google That For You is not only a modern catch phrase, but a fantastic site to use for those too lazy to even look stuff up for themselves.  6th graders arrive at middle school with few, if any, multiplication facts committed to memory.  Why would they?  They have calculators (or WolframAlpha).  There is no need to remember important dates or historical facts.  Wikipedia stands at the ready.

Henri Nouwen, my 2nd favorite author behind Kurt Vonnegut, Jr (what a combination), wrote that all decisions are laden with life and death.  The key to successful living is to make decisions that contain more life than death.

Technology comes with life and death.  We must integrate technology into the classroom.  It is the future, and the future is now.  We cannot ignore it.  But we must also realize the death that comes with it and be prepared to combat that with every sinew of our educational beings.

We have to find a way to allow the technology to spawn creativity again (see Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on how education is killing creativity).  It is through creativity that critical thinking is born, enhanced, and maintained.

Is Google making us stupid?  Is technology destroying critical thinking?  What do you think?  Leave me a comment.