A student’s art project …. stunning.  Love it.

Some days are just the coolest – to quote the teenage vernacular.

This morning I joined a room full of teacher librarians in Washington DC via Skype for two sessions at the School Library Journal Leadership Summit 2009.  It was a rather surreal time looking into the wee green light on the laptop screen and knowing I was beaming on a wall thousands of miles away, yesterday afternoon.

The second huge buzz was this evening getting a VERY excited text from a teacher from school letting me know she has made the finals of the Interface Best Class Blog awards.  Clemency is a stunning teacher and has a wonderful classroom.  Her blog began as a tentative toe dipped in the water and has grown over the past couple of years into a central part of her classroom and classroom programme.  In the usual way with people who do fabulous things she simply sees it as normal, nothing special, and rather mundane.  It is none of these things!  It is a wonderful example of the way Web2.0 technologies can break down the barriers between home and school, make the classroom programme transparent and bring families into the school in so many different ways.  Please take a look at the website and vote for her class blog.  (you do have to be a NZ teacher, or employed in a school to vote though) She thoroughly deserves the accolades!

An interesting note too – 3 of the 10 finalists in the Awards are classrooms and teachers from Dunedin.  Two are from our ICT PD Cluster.  How good are we!

I have been doing quite a bit of thinking recently about managing workflow.  All school leaders have an infinite amount of work to do.  There is always the tension between the important and the urgent.

But once you get down to it there are things I have found help me to actually get the work done.  I am predominantly digital and much of my professional life is on my Mac laptop:

1. I keep as much of my work digital as I can.  I email a lot.  My calendar is iCal.
2. I use Growl – with lots of extensions installed – to let me know when new messages come in, when I have a new message on Skype, etc.  I then get to read mail messages without flicking to the programme itself.
3. Adium is a neat wee application that pulls  iChat etc into one small window. Skype and Adium are on all the time and I use them in very transactional ways to connect with the people that I need to anywhere in the world.
4. My Mail only checks once an hour to reduce distractions
5. My inbox is a sort of ‘to do’ list.  I use a Mail extension called Letterbox to change how Mail looks – into two columns – so I can read the message in one screen full for most messages.  This saves a lot of scrolling and flicking around the screen.
6. I have a notebook.  A good old spiral bound analogue notebook.  And I use this to keep all the business cards, notes, scribbles, etc that I need to keep track of.  Lots of stuff glued in.
7. I run a 20″ monitor plugged into my laptop with a nice set of speakers.  I have music going most of the time and work on the big screen with mail open on my laptop.  Two screens is great!
8. ByteController runs my iTunes – a small application that sits in my taskbar, is easily accessed and enables me to mute, jump around or stop what is playing.  Music helps me concentrate.
9. I TRY to keep my desk as clear as possible.  Vain hope most of the time, but it is a goal.
10. I have a meeting table in my office and a toybox to keep wee people amused if I am needing to have a conversation with their parents. ….
11. I tweak stuff.  I have quite a list of Firefox extensions running as well as specific software installed that modify things to make them look and feel how I want.
12. I have a palm Treo 650 phone that syncs to my laptop with its calendar etc using Missing Sync software.  My pocket buzzes when I am supposed to be remembering things.
13. LOTS of things go into my iCal – I link to emails and paste in documents etc as well so all the information is in one place.  I keep meeting notes in particular events too.

So these are some of the tricks and tweaks I use that have fallen together over the years.  They work for me.

What things do you do to manage your workflow?  Lets share in the comments.

just so I can find it again if needed:

Some bits and pieces passing across the mental bows recently:

1. 

Good graphic to show the difference.  Worth reading the rest of the post too.  From a blog that came through my reader – thanks Rob!

2.  Seth Godin has some good things to say – this sort of thing bugs me too about iCal.  Software needs to be smart and anticipate what our needs may actually be.  The kind of thing David Pogue parodied so well in his TED Talk.

3.  Some questions to ask your kids about what they did at school today to get an answer more than “nothing”:

• What did you make today that was meaningful?
• What did you learn about the world?
• Who are you working with?
• What surprised you?
• What did your teachers make with you?
• What did you teach others?
• What unanswered questions are you struggling with?
• How did you change the world in some small (or big) way?
• What’s something your teachers learned today?
• What did you share with the world?
• What do you want to know more about?
• What did you love about today?
• What made you laugh?

4.  Fendalton Schools cybersafety info – very good! (Rob again!)

5.  GRITS Cluster Junior and Senior resource sharing sites.  Some good stuff here and well sorted into subject areas

6.  Some ideas about good presentation for a CV

love this – via Jedd:

source

This is just incredible. The VERY scary bit is that if we are seeing this then the stuff that is happening in the back rooms and labs around the world will be leaving this in the dust. Like the fact that every piece of technology we have in our lives is out-of-date when we look at what is just about to come on stream. And even more so it you can get insight into the development labs.

What about an OS for a computer that worked like this?
A tablet/iPhone type product with this built in?
The potential for education? Massive.

LINK

Sounds like it is pretty heavily locked down, but still is quite a HUGE commitment by the Ed Department to provide these netbooks for all Y9 children – and they get to keep it if they complete Y13.

Interesting in light of discussions I have been having with our BoT about the values of mobile technology and the interest in netbooks developing in education circles here too.

Similar to Shift Happens:

Ignore the glitz …. worth watching for the message:

To Meet the Demands of a New Age from Steven H on Vimeo.