She spent some time asking me about my vision for my school, but also asked for input on a few things. For instance, she wanted to know what I thought would be the best use of our monthly “levels meetings.” During these times, all the elementary principals, middle school principals, and high school principals get together with their colleagues. As a new principal, this time is going to be invaluable for me to learn from my colleagues at the other middle schools. My suggestion was that as much of the levels meeting time as possible be spent on sharing best practices, collaborating, and learning from each other. Administrivia, or the unidirectional flow of information items that could be handled via email or a memo should not eat into this valuable time that we will have out of our buildings once per month.

I was also very flattered that she asked me about blogging, and about how the Director of Secondary Education might make use of a blog. Like others I have worked with, she is an “article sender.” I’m certain most educational organizations have a person or persons who will send an email or two a week with some “suggested reading” attached or linked. I shared with her that with the high volume of email that I and other principals receive, it’s not unusual for something that isn’t an “emergency” to get overlooked for a day or two. Further, I don’t really care for email attachments as I think they’re an extremely inefficient way to pass along information.

One other assumption in the article-emailing model is that the information is getting to all of the people who need or are interested in it. This involves managing multiple email lists: one for high school principals, one for middle school principals, one for assistant principals… The list goes on. No matter how carefully you curate the lists, someone who wanted the information will be left out, and someone who doesn’t want it will have to either file it away forever because they think they might be asked about it someday, or (gasp!) delete it.

Even if the sole purpose for creating a Director of Secondary Education blog was to share articles and links, this would be a significant benefit to the folks at the buildings. My preferred way of receiving news is via Reeder on my iPad or Google Reader on my MacBook Pro. From there, I’ll often route longer readings to Instapaper so I can focus on them when I have the time.

Further, a blog would bring leaders and prospective leaders in as opposed to an email that is pushed out. I usually have one or two administrative interns who work with me and, despite my best intentions, I don’t always remember to pass along the articles and links that come my way. A blog would be a great forum to bring these up-and-coming leaders into the “fold” and increase their awareness of what is being discussed at the District and principal level.

Finally, with the ability to comment on blog posts, I could see a blog becoming a better place for discussion than the endless CC loops that email encourages and that, for better or worse, eventually get ignored or archived so I can come back later which I rarely remember to do.

It will definitely take some re-norming with principals, but I think given the success of June’s Leadership Bootcamp we are in a great position to start leveraging some more of these one-to-many means of communicating.

Overall, we had what I think was a very productive meeting and I’m excited to work with my new Director in the coming year. Plus, anyone who shows up in my office bearing breakfast burritos and Loveland Coffee knows how to set the tone for a great year!

As I indicated up front, I have untrained myself from the old habit of scribbling notes during meetings. Instead, I capture things that need to be done; actions that need to be taken. Yet I still find myself staring at piles of stuff that may need a home for some unforeseen time in the future when someone might ask me for it. Old meeting agendas, handouts, memos from the district, and the like.

For me, stuff like this breaks down into two basic categories:

Electronic Stuff

• Emails with information that may not be immediately important but may be important later. Dates for trainings for teacher mentors, for instance. I don’t need it now, but may need it when an interested teacher approaches me about mentoring.
• Other important documents you may need access to later. We have an emergency phone tree at my school, for example. Or maybe you got a PDF of a workshop registration attached to an email.
• PDFs or other articles you keep meaning to read. I receive a lot of publications via email. Many of them are compilations of articles from around the web and there are always a few I’d like to read at some magical point in the future, “when I have the time.”

Evernote has become my digital dumping ground. Enough has been written about Evernote that I’m not going to spend a lot of time on what it does or how it works, rather I’m going to share with you how I make it work for me.

I keep a few notebooks for various purposes. I try to keep stuff that is work-related in its own notebook. In my “LHS Reference” notebook, you’ll find math content standards and frameworks, an emergency phone tree, and a list of important district phone numbers.  If I see an article I like, I ask Firefox to print it as a PDF and dump the PDF into my “Articles & Papers” notebook. Receipts for, well, anything get dumped into “Receipts” and anything without a clearly defined place goes into “Random Stuff.”

I recommend starting with one giant notebook and letting things happen organically. For instance, I think I’m going to have another notebook eventually called “Recipes” where I save recipes I come across online.

Non-Electronic Stuff

For stuff that doesn’t exist in electronic format (handouts, whiteboards from great brainstorming sessions, completed classroom observation instruments, etc), my first question is usually whether I can get it into electronic format (and whether I’d want to). One of these days I’ll get a Fujitsu ScanSnap, but until then I have a few other tricks up my sleeve.

“For handouts, I ask the hander-outer if they can email a copy to me or, “Put it on the wiki.” If it’s an Office document – or anything non-PDF – I’ll turn it into a PDF (this functionality is trivial on a Mac). For whiteboards I’ll shoot a picture or two with my iPhone. Both the PDFs and digital images can get dumped into Evernote where it will happily scan all the legible text and make even digital pictures of my whiteboard searchable.

But, alas, there are some things that just don’t make the jump to digital. For instance, I don’t have the time or the need to scan all the data-collection instruments I use for classroom observations. I have a folder for each teacher I evaluate and the instruments go in there. Once I complete a summative evaluation, I usually shred the instruments and move on.

As I mentioned in my very first post in this series, I don’t keep a lot of random stuff in hard copy format if I can avoid it. Having reference items in Evernote makes them easy to search and access if and when I need them.

Putting it together

We’ve come a long way from capture, to action, to filing away stuff you may need to get your hands on at some future time. Regardless of the system you put in place for yourself, make sure it’s something you can stick with and that it becomes a transparent part of your daily routine. The less you have to think about it the better.

By spending some time up front deciding how you plan to capture, act, and file you can free up your valuable time for other things. Plus you’ll feel less stressed because you’ll know you have at least some of your world under control.

Previously

• Part 1
• Part 2

Personally

• Moved the blog to a new host and gave it some new, simple digs. I also decided to include my proudest blogging accomplishment to date: nomination for membership in Dan’s club. I decided to put that badge on my sidebar to remind me why I do this job. Of course, it’s “for the children.” But it’s also for the teachers who bust their butts day in and day out to raise the level of play in their classrooms. To innovate in ways that change the game for themselves and their colleagues.
• Took an amazing family road trip (our first ever!) to Cody, Wyoming, and Yellowstone National Park. Lessons learned include: if/when you decide to take that step of buying a minivan get the DVD player!
• Got involved (rather serendipitously) in a project with some of the guys I knew from the days when the forums at 43 Folders were the place to be for productive folks. We launched a new blog and forum called Work.Life.Creativity. Head over and sign up!
• I’m a bike commuter.
• I didn’t buy an iPhone 3G.
• I really want a Kindle.

Professionally

• I’ve Tweeted about this a couple times, but I’m actually teaching a class next year! While I act like this is a major hardship, what with my administratorial responsibilities and all, the truth is I’m really psyched. Since I’ll be teaching in the IB program (I’m sorry – I meant IB Programme), that meant mandatory summer training in St. Petersburg, Florida. Lesson learned: Even though I grew up in Florida, it’s dang humid down there! Bad for my hair.
• I forgot how to do lesson plans.
• I submitted proposals to present at both the K12 Online Conference in October and FETC in January.
• A Kindle would really streamline my professional reading, don’t you think? And it would pay for itself after 10 or so books. If I could get my grad school textbooks on the thing, it would pay for itself after, like, two books.

Sundry

• Dabbled in Plurk. Meh.
• Decided that pretending Twitter has applications for the classroom is a bit of a stretch. I have, however, acknowledged that it has expanded my professional network and given me unprecedented access to the brains of a lot of people whom I like and respect.
• Finally, Edupunk? Seriously? Edupunk on Wikipedia? Put down the Kool-Aid, people. There’s nothing “punk” about effective, engaging instruction.
• On the other hand, if calling yourself “Edupunk” makes you feel hip, or more importantly teach better, go for it.

So I’m getting things warmed back up over here at the Universe. If you’ve dropped me from your readers or blogrolls, hook it back up! Starting a new year and teaching a class will make for some interesting blogging, after all.

In the coming week, I’m going to start the year off with a “How I Work” series, partly inspired by this great video of Mr. Meyer‘s and partly by my participation at WLC.

So something has to give.

After much reflection, for me it’s going to be the Universe. I’m not saying I will never pick up here again or post on occasion when I have something to write about – I’m sure I will – but finding time to craft any sort of meaningful, high-quality posts has proven to be exceedingly difficult given the papers I’m writing for grad school and the capstone class I’m teaching for teachers-to-be.

My prioritized list of commitments looks something like this:

1. Being a good husband and father by making time for my family FIRST.
   
2. Earning money to support my family by performing well at my day job.
3. Passing my grad school classes.
4. Teaching my undergrad class.
5. Continuing to build the audience around our Practical Principals podcast.
   

Were it not for this blog, I would likely have missed out on the chance to meet (virtually, anyway…) some incredible people with whom I continue to interact via other means. So if you’re looking for me online these days, try here:

If we’re friendly, you can also find me at:

• Flickr
• Vimeo
  

I just felt the need to make it official because I have felt this “weight” hanging over me; this feeling that I’m “slacking” by not keeping the Universe up-to-date.

Remember – this isn’t “good-bye,” it’s “see ya ’round.” I’m officially going on a blogging sabbatical.

[Image credit: "Untitled" by burnblue]

My slideshow has been selected by SlideShare as the “Slideshow of the Day” and has been featured on their main page! This is all kind of overwhelming considering I created the slideshow to present to my faculty, then posted it to my blog figuring a couple people might be interested…

Then, based on some requests, I uploaded it to Slideshare and added audio figuring a couple of people might check it out. So imagine my surprise when I had an email in my box this morning saying my little presentation was going to be featured as the “Slideshow of the Day” on their main page.

I’m truly humbled by all of the positive attention my “Presentation on Presentations” has received since I published it one week ago. I’m especially grateful to those who have linked it on their own blogs and increased the potential reach for this work.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I think it bears repeating that there is nothing in that presentation that I didn’t learn from following in the footsteps of those who have covered this stuff in far greater detail (Dan, Merlin, Guy, Seth, Garr…). I have merely synthesized from the work of others and distilled it down into a presentation that I gave to a group of faculty.

My goal was to whet their appetites. Not to “convert” them to “my” way of thinking, so much as to show them that there are other (better?) ways to use presentation software — to share the possibilities.

I had a limited amount of time and there is a LOT of information out there. I didn’t know if I’d have another opportunity to share this material with them so I wanted to be sure to include as much as possible in the hour that I had. I wanted to leave them hungry to learn more and to some extent I think that I was successful.

Thanks to all who have commented and linked!

[As seen at dy/dan]

2. Keen awareness of the location of potentially dangerous items.

5. All of a Sudden, Everybody Driving Faster than You is a Fricking Maniac.

8. Sleeping In? HAH!

In just two podcasts, we’ve already closed in on almost 100 unique downloads. I don’t know about Melinda, but I don’t have that many relatives I actually speak to so someone must like what we’ve done.

Still need to do something about this, though…

Thanks!

The Practical Principals

Melinda Miller (a.k.a. Principal Miller of Willard, MO) and I have been working to plan and record what we hope will be a twice-monthly podcast geared toward the nuts and bolts of administratoring for those new and old administrators alike.

One of the things that we all know is that for teachers and administrators there is a major portion of our day-to-day jobs for which no college textbook or 3-credit course can ever prepare you. To that end, we’re hoping that by sharing our experiences in a relaxed, conversational manner might benefit others looking to grow their support networks.

Of course, we’ve got a blog to accompany the podcast and we hope that you’ll consider subscribing! We’re also hoping to finish up the website this week and hope to add a section where listeners can contribute ideas for us to discuss. In addition, we’re not going to be just a two-person show for long — we want YOU to join us and lend your voice! If you’re interested in being on the podcast, drop us a line. We’d love to have you.

We envision a three or four-person round table to discuss either news items or a specific topic in every episode. We hope you’ll check us out and be a part of the podcast!

You can download Episode 1 directly by clicking here, or head over to the blog and subscribe in iTunes or your favorite podcatcher.

I’m still new to recording and audio editing, but I think the content will make up for any initial deficiencies in my audio engineering technique. We’re also going to need new theme music (the current one is just a generic GarageBand loop) so if you’re musically inclined, hook us up!