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.

Apple Education Event

Apple hits it out of the park with iBooks2 and iBooks author. Apple just keeps on innovating. They are reinventing the textbook. They released 2 new tools that will help schools move to electronic, educator-created, texts. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/01/apple-announcement-ibooks-2-ibooks-author-for-digital-textbooks/ excerpt: “Schiller and his Apple colleagues showed off two new applications to take the information in textbooks and [...]

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Recipe or Creative Cooking?

Remember those standardized test questions of the type – A is to B as C is to blank, and the test taker has to select the missing element? They tend to be written like this – DUNCE : GENIUS :: ______ : CONSERVE, with choices like: ENVIRONMENT, PROTECT, WASTE   Well here’s one to think [...]

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Wall Quote #7

The 7th in my series of posting the quotes that I have used to decorate the walls of my office.   Previous: One Two Three Four Five Six

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Discretionary Effort

Thanks to Miguel Guhlin for his post about discretionary effort. He says he learned about this concept from Crucial Conversations (coincidentally, I also listened to this – it was recent listening-while-driving book). I have a poster in my office (my own creation) that looks like this: It is my reminder to work in all areas [...]

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Activator

I used this activity as an activator at a retreat for district administrators, and I think it would be just as successful to launch a professional development day for teachers. The activity requires people to work in teams. I set up teams of 4 to 5 people because I decided to focus the debrief and [...]

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Wall Quote 6

The sixth in my series of posting the quotes that I have used to decorate the walls of my office.   Previous: One Two Three Four Five    

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Advocacy and Inquiry

We’ve all sat in meetings where one person keeps advocating for their position ceaselessly. They appear not even to listen to others, but instead are busy preparing their next comments while others speak. Allowing others (or yourself) to get stuck in advocacy mode does not help reach consensus, and even hinders collegial debate. It also [...]

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EdTechActionNetwork

Please support the modernize K-12 schools legislation and contact your elected representatives telling them so. From the EdTechActionNetwork web site: “ACT NOW to Modernize America’s Schools Fix America’s Schools Today (FAST) Act would provide $25 billion to modernize K-12 schools. The Fix America’s Schools Today (FAST) Act has been introduced in the U.S. House of [...]

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For-Profit Schools

How do you feel about for-profit schools? Is your school feeling the pinch of reduced budgets? Are any of your students exiting to “attend” for-profit schools? Diane Ravitch’s 11/29 blog post (Education Week blogs) “Should Schools Be Run for Profit?” is a thought-provoking addition to the debate. One issue I have with the piece is [...]

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Easy, Simple Interoperability

District Administration magazine has a new section of their magazine devoted to issues in technology leadership, and they’re calling it District CIO. It makes sense to me that more publications are recognizing the distinct role that the technology leader has in the school district. I look forward to seeing what they address in this section. [...]

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