Tuesday+Symposium

Comments from Tuesday:

The Keynote Tim Walters presented some very interesting and challenging thoughts this morning about leadership within the school. He emphasized the importance of teacher leadership within the classroom as well as among staff. As educators we need to ask the question of "does what we are doing add value to the classroom". In the end that is what every person within the school district has to have a s a goal; to add value to learning in the classroom. Superintendents, Principals, support staff, and classroom teachers all need to have the single focus of adding value to the opportunities for students to learn in the classroom. I really enjoyed his commentary on eliminating the variability of the quality of instruction in the classroom. Every student should have consistentcy and improvement in their quality of learning every day they walk through the doors.

Specifically he paralelled high-reliability organizations with our educational system. In a high-reliabilty organization, failure is often catastrophic in result. Organizations such as air traffic control, surgical procedures, and nuclear power are examples. The differrence is that education is not an immediate catastrophe, it is a "slow burn", in which we don't see the catastrophic results until years down the road. Pricipals and teachers need to work together in nine areas of influence and importance to create consistency in the quality of education on a daily basis in the classroom. They are; Change agents, Communication, Involvement consistent instruction & assessment, Input, Intellectual stimulation, Optimization, Order, Outreach, Resources. Schools that are actively involved in these activities are constantly monitoring and reworking their best to be better thus giving every student the consistent quality of education that they deserve.

I also enjoyed the presentation on an Web 2.0 presentation tool called Prezi. It is a neat alternative to PowerPoint, in fact you can import PowerPoint from a PDF format into Prezi without having to re-create the content. It has an alternative method in showing and displaying slides that is a little more entertaining. Being a web 2.0 tool it is accessible anytime/anyplace. You don't have to have a flash drive or your computer with you physically to have access to your presentation.