I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on marketing. If the Amazon widget doesn’t load in a few seconds, here’s a static picture of the list.
[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]
Earlier this week I disagreed with Jeff Utecht. Today I’m going to heartily agree with him. Over at the SchoolFinder blog, Jeff said:
It was interesting yesterday at a parent coffee we held where Kim Cofino and I showed the parents Karl Fisch’s Did You Know video. We had one parent ask “What is the school doing to prepare my child for this future?” That’s what we need. We need the parents to start asking those questions of our school. We need to educate our school boards, our parents, and then we will see change…..hopefully.
I’m absolutely delighted that the parent asked one of the questions from the end of Did You Know? 2.0. That’s exactly why Karl, xplane, and I included those questions – to prompt some parental and community pressure on school organizations and policymakers.
Many of us spend a lot of time working with educators, trying to help them envision what a change to a 21st century teaching-learning model might look like. But usually we don’t spend nearly enough time working with parents and community members – creating the vision, answering questions, and addressing concerns.
We need to be better communicators with our local folks, and by that I mean our entire community, not just the school board. We need to take every opportunity we can to have group conversations with parents and community supporters. They need to understand how our personal and professional lives are changing dramatically because of these digital technologies. Even if they’re not living it themselves at home or at work, they’re feeling the effects through their children, their employer, or their friends and family. But they may not understand exactly the depth of what’s occurring…
Help them understand. A side chat at a school event or over the back fence can pay dividends later when the school system asks for the community’s suppport. E-mailing a couple of videos can spark a conversation when you bump into someone at the grocery store, soccer game, or band concert. Invite a few people over for snacks and, while the kids play in the backyard or you play bridge, bring up a couple of issues for them to think about.
We need to invest more in our communities’ capacity to understand and to assist.
What are some successes that you’ve had with your local community? What are some good strategies that you can share for facilitating local stakeholder buy-in for 21st century-related change initiatives?
Although we need some more lists of subject-specific blogs (which I’ll work on in future posts), the blogs page of the Moving Forward wiki is basically a pretty solid resource right now. The wiki and podcast pages, however, could use some work…
If you know of an exemplary K-12 classroom wiki or podcast project, would you add the link to the appropriate wiki page?
Thanks!
[The Moving Forward wiki houses a collection of resources to help presenters and change agents as they help move schools and universities forward into the 21st century. If you have a resource to add, please do so!]
Over at the On Our Minds @ Scholastic blog, Tyler Reed is pondering the recent announcement by the Lamar (MS) County School District that it will prohibit teachers from communicating with students via social networking tools such as Facebook or MySpace.
The question in my mind is:
Why treat social networking spaces differently than any other means of teacher communication?
The issue is actual inappropriate teacher communication and/or behavior (which I’m guessing is already covered by board policy), not the method by which teachers communicate with students. A prohibition on use of social networking tools does absolutely nothing to prevent inappropriate teacher communication with students via other channels. So the district either needs to implement similar policies for telephones, snail mail, written notes, instant messaging, cell phone text messaging, e-mail, online video, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and the like or it needs to justify why social networking sites are so evil compared to all the other ways that teachers and students can communicate.
If the district is going to ban social networking and other 21st century communication tools, it’s going to be awfully busy making policies since new tools pop up every week. Also, one of the first things you learn in law school is that you should never make a rule you can’t enforce. How on earth would the district ever monitor this?
Facebook and MySpace are the 5th and 7th most popular sites on the Internet, respectively. Instead of exploring how teachers, students, and parents can use these sites productively, the district instead has turned into the social networking Nazi: no Facebook for you! Just for kicks, I took a look at the performance of the Lamar County schools. My suggestion for the school board is that perhaps its time and energy would be better spent raising the low academic performance of the students in the poorest school in the district rather than passing unnecessary and unenforceable policies.
This whole thing is just goofy…
Will Richardson has yet another post that’s generated a great deal of discussion. This time it’s about the value of Twitter for conversation. Will ponders Twitter’s impact on conversations and suspects that maybe it’s making us lazy…
For me it’s about the conversation but, more importantly, it’s also about the uncovering of personality. The social web is about people and connectivity, right? So every blog, tweet, Skype chat, comment, Flickr photo, YouTube video, Facebook update, or Ning post – they’re each another gap-filler for me. Chink by chink, brick by brick, pixel by pixel – the picture becomes more clear and complete. Is this someone with whom I want to connect? Is this someone with whom I want to converse? Is this someone from whom I want to learn?
That’s the power of Twitter (and blogging and … ) for me. Is it maddeningly disjointed and unconnected? Absolutely. But that’s what happens when everyone has a voice and when there are numerous tools to express ourselves. Our aggregation and monitoring tools will get better in the years to come. In the meantime, I’m going to celebrate the power and potential of our new information landscape, despite all of its frustrating flaws and growing pains, because I know that it has greatly enriched my life and exponentially expanded my horizons (cue the violins)…
Photo credit: weblogg-ed.com
Is anyone else feeling a bit overwhelmed by all of the information available here at NECC? It’s bad enough when we’re at home, but the focused concentration of all of these people on this single event within a short time period, combined with the proliferating use of both older tools (Twitter, blogs, RSS, tags) and newer tools (Summize, Ustream, CoverItLive), along with all of the new people I’m meeting (and thus want to add to my ‘personal learning network’), is leading to some serious mental overload.
Is it possible to actually attend conference (and unconference) sessions as well as … ?
Maybe I’m getting old, but my brain hurts. In a good way, but it still hurts.
Photo credit: ‘a’ stands for headache
Here are my notes from ISTE’s annual digital equity summit at NECC. There is too much information to fit in one post so I’m breaking it up…
Communications Industry: A Look Ahead
Link Hoewing, Vice President, Internet and Technology Policy, Verizon Communications
Everything is moving from fixed to mobile technologies (both voice and broadband)
[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]
My city’s public library is a wonderful place. It hosts a variety of
well-attended events, has a phenomenal children’s section, and serves as a real
hub for the community. But its formal communications stink.
The very first time that you have an overdue book, the initial notice that
you receive says that failure to pay your fines may result in being turned over
to a collection agency. Ouch. When you request a book,
the notification that the book is in says that failure to pick up the book
promptly will result in a $0.50 fine. Huh? If you
write a letter to the public library’s director highlighting the somewhat
draconian tone of its communications, you receive a letter justifying the
library’s terseness (trust me on this one). So despite all of the great things
that the public library does, you’re still left with a bitter taste in your
mouth.
Seth
Godin reminds us that every interaction with a customer / client / patron /
stakeholder / visitor is a marketing interaction. It’s
an opportunity for us to build or erode our brand, a chance to increase or
decrease the trust and goodwill of the people with whom we are interacting.
What’s this mean for schools? Well, it means that every time a parent walks
away unhappy from an encounter at school, that’s a marketing interaction. Every
time a teacher has yet another boring lesson, that’s a marketing interaction.
Every time a school board member puts her personal agenda ahead of what’s best
for students, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a member of the
community walks through an uninviting building, that’s a marketing interaction.
And every time an administrator squanders an opportunity to be a leader rather
than a manager, that’s a marketing interaction.
Schools do a host of wonderful things. But they also engage in a number of
individual and organizational behaviors that chip away at the trust and goodwill
of their internal and external communities. We can bemoan the lack of student
engagement / parent support / community involvement / referendum votes all we
want, but our actions probably led to the problem(s) in the first place. Putting
forth a glossy spin on the surface (We’re the best! Support us!) does
no good if we’re not willing to look at our underlying practices as the
marketing interactions that they are.
Many of you know that I’m asking the edublogosphere to gradually help me flesh out the Moving Forward wiki so that it can be a valuable resource to presenters and others who are trying to facilitate change in schools. For example, in April we identified a number of high-quality elementary classroom blogs.
This week I’m asking for great blogs that are of interest to special education teachers (particularly special education teachers who are blogging themselves). By great blogs, I mean the kind that you might show in a presentation to persuade others of the power and potential of blogging for teachers of students with special needs. If you know of any such blogs, please add them to the wiki!
I really wanted to like the Creating Valuable Class Web Sites article in the May 2008 issue of Learning and Leading With Technology. I really did. I believe strongly that teachers should be incorporating digital technologies into their instruction and communication with students and parents, and I know that teachers can use all of the good ideas, best practices, and resources that we can provide. But then I read the article (hat tip to Sylvia Martinez and Bud Hunt) and I was completely dismayed…
As Sylvia and Bud noted on Twitter, many of the web sites presented by the author are quite dated. Geocities and Tripod: weren’t those big in the 1990s? Netscape Composer: Seriously? FrontPage: didn’t Microsoft quit selling that a while ago? The inclusion of such tools calls into serious question the currency, and thus credibility, of the author’s expertise.
The Resources section at the end was similarly lacking. Take a look at Blog Connection. It was one of the two best blogging sites the author could recommend for K-12 educators? And EdBlogger Praxis? The site that hasn’t been updated since February 2007? At least the author linked to eMINTS when it came to wikis…
Instead of tables of outdated web resources and an irrelevant resources section, the author should have included current tools rather than those from 5–10 years ago. Some discussion of the desirability of using outside, non-district-sponsored tools also would have been nice. Instead, the article reads like it was cobbled together by someone who’s rooted in the technology of yesteryear rather than today. This was an opportunity squandered. Is this stuff what the author teaches her students? Doesn’t ISTE have a responsibility to do some checking of article content?
Learning and Leading With Technology is supposed to be helpful to educators in 2008, not 1998. And usually it fulfills that function extremely well. I hate to say this – because I’m rarely critical in public of others (unless they’re clueless leaders who should know better) – but the author and the ISTE editors didn’t do their job with this one.
