LeaderTalk has been a great source of inspiration for me lately. Greg Farr’s Web 2.0 Credo (Great stuff, Greg!) reminded me of some important realizations I’ve had on my journey this year. Not the least of which is the power of modeling what you want the staff to be doing. In my "younger" days as a budding administrator, I thought it was enough to issue a mandate: "Every teacher will have a web page." Of course, every teacher would have had a web page, and it would have sucked all the excitement right out of the process. Instead of "Hey, this is cool!" it would have been yet another thing "we have to do."

As I’ve posted previously in my ongoing series about our Internet Study group, I have had the most incredible leadership epiphany this year. Starting with just one interested teacher, people started coming to me: "Hey – I saw what Mr. Scott was doing and that’s really cool! Can you help me get started?" And that eventually grew into our Internet Study this semester where a group of about a dozen teachers and administrators meet at lunch once a week to talk about how technology can be better integrated into their classrooms.

I haven’t gotten near the level of integration that Greg has seen, but as T.S. Eliot wrote, "Indeed there will be time." It’s already been gratifying to hear a few teachers comment to me that students who never turned in a homework assignment were pestering them to post a new poem on their blog to which to respond. These are the kids who couldn’t be bothered to "read the attached poem and write a one-page response…"  And one Language Arts teacher has gone "political" by having her students write thoughtful, research-based responses to her mini-rant about school dress codes. Check it out – the responses may surprise you!

Our AP Language teachers have already seen the value in posting their summer reading lists on their wikis. Now when students register in the summer, they can be directed to the teacher’s wiki page to see what’s expected before starting school in the fall.