Has anyone else noticed that most school leaders are very good at thinking through school board governance issues, initiative implementation, resource allocation, and goal evaluation, but are not very adept at Web 2.0 tools? Have you also noticed that #edtech-ies (this is a morph of the very popular twitter hash-tag stream of tweets from people passionate about technology integration into learning and classrooms) are very good at understanding the concepts behind share settings, Rss feeds, social bookmarking, and open source computing, but are not very good at working with school boards, thinking through the implementation of a new initiative, how to allocate fiscal resources, or evaluation of staff progress toward goals?
What would it take to have an amalgamation of both? What if we could have the leader who is adept at all the school leadership stuff and understand Rss feeds and twitter streams? What could we all accomplish then?
The challenge is for these two types of people to meet in the middle, for the leaders to sit down with the #edtech-ies and cross pollinate. Does anyone have any recommendations as to how to do this?
Talk to each other. What if the #edtechies invited leaders and the community to come and see the potential of technology? Often times school board leaders do get it and realize that many in their communities do not. Show people how to use Twitter and Facebook. Then use these tools to showcase student work. I don't know for certain, but I suspect that much of the reluctance of leaders and communities is that they have not had the experiences with technology that the #edtechies have had. So, provide the opportunities.
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