Blogs on Principals

I had a conversation a few months ago with a parent about being a school principal. We were talking about the various demands of the job, from the different constituents that a school principal has to work with to the environment of a school. The parent asked me how I would define the job if I had only one word to use.

The word I chose was safety. The parent expressed some surprise and intrigue at my answer. We proceeded to talk about safety on multiple levels, beginning with physical safety, moving to emotional safety and finishing with academic safety.

Just let me start off by saying that the term "21st Century Learning" still drives me crazy. If you think about it, in the last ten years have we progressed in our thoughts about what learning should look like and could be? What about in the next 50 years? Will "21st Century Learning" be the same, or will we still promote the same skills? Who knows? But I am sure that our world will continue to change significantly.

#Satchat is a great example of the power of social media to improve education, and the benefit of expanding an educator's Personal Learning Network (PLN). The premise behind this Twitter chat/hashtag came about when Scott Rocco (@ScottRRocco) and I (@bcurrie5) connected on Twitter in February 2012. Both of us had a passion for education and knew other school leaders around the globe who shared our enthusiasm. What we would soon realize is that this passion was not restricted to local or national educators, but had a global reach.

One of the easiest things for any tech person to forget is the presence of non-instructional types in the building. There's so much great technology out there for school administrators, but tech support often overlooks them because their job focus is helping classroom instruction. There is tremendous value in reaching out to on-site administrators and seeing what they need. Here are some of the benefits to thinking about your administrators when it comes to tech support.