Welcome to K12EduBuzz.com. I am Jean Tower and I appreciate your visit to my blog. I encourage comments and look forward to online conversations with my readers.

Cool Tools

Articles and workshops about cool tools for teachers abound. Here are a few cool tools for administrators.
Cool Tool #1: My Favorite Scanner
I have a small Fujitsu scanner on my desk, the Scansnap 300. It is amazing how much this has changed how I handle paper in my office. Mine is over a year old, [...]

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10 Reasons to Conduct a Technology Audit

Reason 1:
To assess your progress against goals and objectives set forth in your technology plan
Reason 2:
To assess your technology program against national and state standards
Reason 3:
To raise awareness about the successes and challenges of technology in the schools among all constituencies – school boards, superintendents, technology directors, principals, teachers, students, parents, and community members
Reason [...]

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Strategic or tactical?

Do you spend more time visioning and planning the future or coping with the problems of today? Are you constantly putting out fires, or are you creating a technology infrastructure and department that prevents fires? I strive for a balance – I need to be concerned about and help with the issues my users [...]

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Encourage Some Risk-Taking!

If you think you have to fully understand everything about a technology before you allow it to be used in your district, you’ll never try anything new. You’ll spend all your time trying to anticipate problems, control small risks, and trying to configure things so that the genie doesn’t get out of the bottle.
My own [...]

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Authorized and Emergent

My goal is to position technology in our district such that it supports both the “authorized” work of schools, as well as the emergent. Authorized here is meant to include current communication systems and software and tools that are accepted and have widespread use. Emergent technologies are those that we are considering adopting or are [...]

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Seeing the Whole Elephant

R emember the old parable from India about the blind men and the elephant ? The parable tells the story of a group of blind men, each trying to describe the elephant from the one bit of the elephant he is touching. The blind man at the tail says the elephant is a rope, [...]

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Obama to Address Students

President Obama is going to address students this week. The White House has released the text of his prepared remarks. I have been amazed that some parents, across the country, have made this a controversial issue. Having read his speech, I am not just amazed, but sad that some students might miss this powerful message [...]

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Planning Professional Development

E.W. Dijkstra, the Dutch computer scientist, once said that, “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” If one takes this line of thinking and applies it to computers in education, one can assert that the use of computers in education is not about the computers; it is about education. [...]

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The Change Process

People trying to quit smoking have been found by researchers to move through certain predictable phases as they change their behavior. The basic change model was developed by the psychologists James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente (see The Five Stages of Change at http://www.agale.com.au/ FiveStagesOfChange.htm). Others have generalized these phases to other types of behavioral [...]

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Distributed Leadership for Educational Technology

I have been working with a group of educators on a position paper about leadership for technology. Our paper is based on the premise that leadership for technology must be distributed among many roles, each having an important part in leading the charge. It will outline the leadership responsibilities for the Department of Elementary [...]

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