Back in Action

29. August 2011 · 3 comments · Categories: Leadership

I can’t believe the amount of time that has elapsed since my last post in April. Here’s a quick recap of what’s been going on in my life over the last four months (four months!?!)…

  • May saw some significant layoffs due to a RIF in my district. Not a lot of fun for a first-year principal who spent the entire year building culture.
  • June was a great month for me as it was the second summer that I was fortunate to teach “Leadership & Ethics in Public Education” in the principal licensure cohort at CSU.
  • July started with an amazing family road trip to see my grandmother for her 90th birthday, take the kids to Washington, DC, and visit my brother and his family in Charlotte.
  • July into August I was back at work planning and working with my new assistant principal on clarifying a vision for my second year leading the best middle school on the Front Range.

And what’s to come this year?

  • I just finished and defended my preliminary exam so I’m officially a PhD candidate now. Or, “ABD.”
  • I am working on my dissertation proposal and hoping to defend this fall.
  • I’ve got several staff members who will be joining me as presenters at the CAMLE Schools-to-Watch Conference in a few weeks.
  • Hopefully, after a marathon 2010-2011 year in which I was a brand new principal and completed my final four (yes, four…) required grad school classes, Melinda and I will be able to make time to record your favorite podcast on a semi-regular basis again.

More later!

Air Head

03. April 2011 · 7 comments · Categories: Technology · Tags: , , , ,

This is going to be a long, fairly technical post about how I manage files and use my new MacBook Air. If you’re here for leadership-related stuff, check back soon!

In my house, we generally run on a 3-4 year laptop replacement cycle. My 2007 MacBook Pro 15″ (pre-unibody) started showing signs of being long in the tooth shortly after it was out of AppleCare warranty (naturally). Dodgy fan issues, spontaneous shutdowns, and other issues made it unreliable for dissertation-writing and general use.

When the new MacBook Airs made their appearance in October of 2010, my initial thoughts were, “Way cool! But not for serious work.” After taking a long, hard look at what I actually use my computer for (writing, surfing, emailing, light podcasting, light photo editing) instead of what I wish I used a computer for (massive video editing and audio recording, professional-level photo-editing), I decided that I would probably be very happy with an Air — especially in the portability department.

I’d been saving for a while and, despite almost backing down at the eleventh hour and ordering a 13″ MacBook Pro, a considerable amount of research pushed me over the edge and I pulled the trigger on an 11″ MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM and a 64GB of SSD.

Rookie Mistakes

Moving in to a new computer is always liberating and stressful, but when your new digs only provide 64GB of disk space, some extra diligence is required. Prior to the new machine’s arrival, I started a Simplenote with all of the apps I use regularly. These were the ones I’d install right away.

I overcompensated a bit, though. I moved my entire 90GB iTunes library onto an external USB drive. I did the same with my Aperture library. If you’re reading this looking for tips on MacBook Air file management, let me give you a big one: DO NOT DO WHAT I DID!

In theory, having your iTunes library on an external drive sounds like the way to go. That is until you actually want to sync an iPhone or listen to music. Then you have to have your drive with you and plug it in. I found this to be unacceptable since one of the main reasons I bought this machine was to have the extra portability.

Further, I found it to be ridiculous hauling my entire Aperture library around with me all the time. Plus, having my images on the external USB drive killed the zippiness that the SSD provides when it comes to accessing and navigating through my images.

So the external drive solution killed the two biggest benefits of moving to an Air: Being tethered to an external drive lowered the portability factor, and moving large image files back and forth over USB 2.0 negated the speed benefits of the SSD.

How I Roll

After living with this for a few weeks, I’ve come up with the following solutions that work well for me.

I have to credit The Mac Instructor Blog for pushing my thinking on the iTunes issue. The author, Rick Stawarz, had a great post about Home Sharing which is arguably the most under-utilized feature in iTunes. If I’m being honest, at any given time I’m probably actively listening to less than 500MB of my 90GB library. I turned my old MacBook Pro (which has been relegated to Club Penguin duty since it constantly has to be plugged in) into my “main” music library. With Home Sharing enabled on both my Air and my old Pro, I can delete music from my Air with the confidence of knowing it will remain in my “official” library on my Pro. I have also set up iTunes on the Pro to auto-import new music and apps from my Air so I also have the assurance that anything I purchase on my Air (or on my iPhone or iPad which are synced to the Air) will eventually find its way back to the Pro.

So all of my music and movies reside on the Pro with its 500GB hard drive. The Pro is also the machine that syncs video with my (first-gen) Apple TV so this works very well. Just within the last week, I’m seeing some promise in Amazon’s Cloud Drive for those of us with more music than disk space.

For images, I read a post at the Aperture Users Network that turned me on to Aperture 3′s library splitting/merging features. In short, I can keep my full Aperture library on an external USB drive while still carrying around, say, my last 30-days worth of images. Images I add or changes I make on the Air will sync when I plug in my USB drive and “merge” libraries.

As it stands right now, I have 30-days worth of images and a decent library of my current favorite music on my Air and I’m sitting with just over 22GB of free space.

Back That Thing Up

The last piece of the puzzle for me is backup. Having been burned last summer when my wife’s 2006 “BlackBook” died very suddenly, I have become a little obsessed with backup. I have taken many of the ideas herein from the comprehensive backup strategy shared by Frank Chimero.

For starters, I use Dropbox for most of my working files. I have cleaned things up quite a bit and now use a similar system to that described by Chimero for folder and file naming. Older stuff has been zipped up and pushed to my Amazon S3 account (more on that later).

I recently discovered Amazon S3′s Reduced Redundancy Storage. Using a nifty, lightweight app called Arq, my entire home directory is backed up to my S3 account. (I also installed Arq on my wife’s MacBook Pro and it does its thing without ever getting in her way.) My bill for March, backing up both of our machine’s to the cloud, was $2.22. Considering most of that was for the “throughput” of the initial backup (subsequent backups just make incremental changes and push far less data), I’d say this is a pretty economical solution. Almost too cheap and easy not to use. There is no excuse for not backing up.

In addition to all that, once a week I use SuperDuper to clone my entire 64GB hard drive to one of two external USB drives. This is a 500GB portable USB drive partitioned into three sections: (1) backup, (2) libraries, and (3) scratch. My cloned HDD image is stored in the backup section. My Aperture library and a backup copy of my iTunes library are stored in the libraries section. I use the scratch section for moving things back and forth, or for audio or video recording and editing. This drive is small and travels with me in my Tom Bihn Ristretto.

Finally, the entire 500GB drive is cloned once a week to an identical drive that I keep at work.

I told you I was a bit OCD about backups.

Bored Yet?

If you’ve made it this far and are still awake, thanks for reading. I hope that you’ve found some of this to be helpful in some way. In short, if you’re contemplating a jump to the MacBook Air, do it! You won’t be sorry. And once you tweak some of your file management techniques you’ll be glad you decided to on the smallest, lightest MacBook to date.

Engaging Teachers in Instructional Rounds

24. February 2011 · 12 comments · Categories: Education, Leadership · Tags: , , ,

I had the good fortune to spend about three hours this morning with seven of my teachers as well as my instructional coach who are part of an intra-school “pilot” project inspired by Richard Elmore’s Instructional Rounds in Education. It’s a big chunk of my day, but this is the work that instructional leaders should be doing.

The Why

I have a personal goal to support teachers in talking to each other about their practice. As Elmore points out, “one of the greatest barriers to school improvement is the lack of an agreed-upon definition of what high-quality instruction looks like” (p. 3). The rounds process is intended to bring conversations about instructional practice into the school improvement process. The rounds process is adapted from the medical rounds model and includes “observing, analyzing, discussing, and understanding instruction” (p. 3).

My hope is that I can expand this school-wide next year, but I wanted to start small. I worked with my instructional coach to solicit seven teacher volunteers to be part of this pilot. I have a cross-section of disciplines, grade levels, and experience and we meet biweekly for a total of seven sessions. Each teacher will open their classroom to the group one time and have the opportunity to observe the other six over the course of the pilot.

In Elmore’s parlance, I have a theory of action that looks something like this:

If we develop and nurture a school culture that supports collaborative inquiry and the sharing of best teaching practices, then classroom instruction will be strengthened and students will learn in deeper, more authentic ways.

The How

The participants voluntarily come in to pre-brief at 6:45am on lab days. They have no incentive other than coffee and conversation along with their commitment to improve their practice through sharing in the lab experience. Though all participants are observing the same class at the same time, each bring a different inquiry question to the lab experience. These questions run the gamut and are highly dependent on the teachers’ interests and perceived areas for growth.

Some examples of inquiry questions from this group:

  • How can a teacher foster global citizenship in his or her students?
  • What strategies do teachers use to get students talking about text?
  • How can social studies teachers more effectively include historical fiction in their units of instruction?
  • How can I move students from external accountability to intrinsic responsibility for their learning?
  • How can I ensure that my lessons are authentic and connect students with the larger social context?

The teacher being observed may also pose a specific question related to their class being observed. These questions are posted on our neopolitan-colored “Board of Inquiry.”

At our pre-brief, we also assign people to track specific data that the host teacher requests. For instance, this morning we tracked:

  • Use of vocabulary by teacher and students that indicates “global literacy”
  • Connections from historical fiction text to self
  • Wait time between posing a questions and selecting a student to respond

The most challenging part is arranging class coverage for the observing teachers so that we can all be together to observe and de-brief the process. I am very passionate about the success of this pilot and have committed to using a chunk of the sub dollars allocated to me for professional development. On lab days, we use in-house coverage only when absolutely necessary, instead bringing in four or five half-day subs to cover for lab participants.

Following the one-hour classroom observation, we take a short break, top off our coffees, and re-convene for a de-brief.

Once everyone is back together, we sit silently for a few minutes to reflect on our initial observations. We go quickly around the table, sharing an objective, non-value-laden observation about what we’ve seen. Our instructional coach then leads the group through a discussion connecting one or two of the principles from the Elmore book to the lesson we observed.

It is at this point in the process that the requested data is shared and processed, along with other relevant information. For instance, this morning one of the participants noted that the host teacher had asked 70 questions in a 60-minute observation.

The hour-long debrief process usually flies by, and ultimately ends with each participant sharing something that they believe they have learned about the host teachers core principles. Examples include:

  • Ms. X seems to value every student’s contribution to her class.
  • It seems very important to Ms. X that her students access their personal experience to build background knowledge before tackling new text.
  • Based on the discussion, it seems like Ms. X has high expectations that students are able to connect course content to real-world contexts.

Final Thoughts (For Now)

We are two lab cycles in to our pilot project and we continue to re-visit the norms we established at the outset. It is incredibly courageous of the teacher participants to open up their classrooms to their colleagues, and all have expressed their nervousness to do so.

All in all, I think the two teachers who have hosted to this point have come away feeling positive about the experience. My hope is to generate enough energy and momentum to roll this out school-wide next year. The logistics of pulling this off with 44 full-time faculty will be a bit of a challenge, but I believe passionately that this is the work we should be doing so I am committed to figuring out how to make it happen even if it means I’ll be covering classes.

Narrative Research on a Mac

08. February 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: Software, Tools · Tags: , , , ,

As part of my class last fall in Narrative Inquiry, we were required to keep a research journal. Like any self-respecting geek, I kept mine in a WordPress blog that I am about to delete because it’s abandoned and getting non-stop spam at this point. While most of the posts were about class assignments, this is the one post I wanted to save so I can re-visit it and keep it up-to-date.

Last Revised in February 8, 2011

One of the things people who know me well will tell you is that I am a major Apple geek. If Apple put their logo on a pair of socks, I’d buy them and proceed to tell everyone I know how superior they are to Windows and Linux socks.

In terms of my work in Narrative Inquiry, I wanted to make mention of a couple of the tools I discovered (or discovered new uses for) over the course of the semester. Some of these I used for transcribing interviews, coding and reviewing notes, and outlining and diagramming major themes. Maybe these can help future students who want to use some digital tools in their narrative research.

Scrivener

A powerful application, Scrivener is used by writers for everything from lengthy legal briefs to crafting the great American novel. I’ve used Scrivener for the first pass of almost all of my academic writing since starting my PhD program in 2007. Version 2.0 was recently released and there is a Windows version in Beta as I write this. In my work for this course, Scrivener was an invaluable tool for transcribing audio files and putting together a final transcript.

iAnnotate PDF

I actually started coding my transcript in hard-copy form. What I couldn’t shake was the sense that pulling the codes together at the end was going to be a lot more work than it needed to be. Using my iPad and iAnnotate, I was able to use several colors of highlighter to identify key themes that I identified in the interview. Once the highlighting was complete, I was able to export the highlighted text as a plain text file for further analysis. The plain text file includes data on the color used to highlight each piece of text.

OmniOutliner Pro

Once I had the plain text out of iAnnotate, the next step was to regroup like colors together into some kind of an outline. For years, the “non-pro” version of OmniOutliner was bundled on every Mac. I used it from time to time for class notes and the like, but doing narrative research I discovered it’s real power to import raw .txt files and simplify the process of cleaning it up and getting it in outline form. Not only does OmniOutliner save in its own native file format, it also has the capability to export outlines in the standard OPML format that can be read by other applications.

OmniGraffle Pro

OmniGraffle Pro has the ability to read files that have been formatted in OPML and turn them into visual displays. At first this was just a way for me to see how far I could push my “all electronic” system, but I really liked the way that it looked. I found that it was nice to have a graphical representation of how the coding was looking.

I’m not sure if this will ever be helpful to other narrative researchers considering how to use their Mac to the best of its ability, but I found this to be a great starting point for my work in this class.

UPDATE 2/8/2011: PDF Expert

With a UI that is far superior to iAnnotate’s, PDF Expert only lacks one feature and that is the ability to export highlighted text to a plain text email. That being said, it’s worth a look if that is not the killer feature for you. I’ve downloaded and used it for class readings when I knew I wouldn’t have a reason to export length quotations.

Moving to a Staff Blog

05. February 2011 · 31 comments · Categories: blogging, Education, Leadership

In August, I went cold-turkey and informed my teachers that I would not be sending mass emails this year. I briefly touched on how inefficient email is as a one-to-many communication tool and most nodded along as they’ve all fallen victim to the “TMI” of a colleague who uses “reply all” to share that they wouldn’t make the faculty meeting because they’d been having stomach cramps all day.

As with the introduction of anything completely new, I explained to them the trade-off I was willing to make. My school was functioning under an intense “culture of meetings” that, in my opinion, was a little excessive. I committed to them to cut down on meeting times, but the trade-off was that all “FYI” items — without exception — would be posted on a private staff blog and that they were responsible for checking it every day.

Knowing that there would still be some for whom this was uncomfortable, I enabled a “subscribe by email” button at the top of the page. This meant that it was up to each individual to subscribe if they wanted to continue to receive school news via email. For me, this meant that I still only had to post in one place.

As a last bit of insurance, I worked with our school technologist to ensure that our staff blog was the browser start-up page on teacher computers. This means that it’s staring them in the face every time they open their browsers.

The benefits of the staff blog as I have seen them unfold this year are:

  • Information is archived. How many emails do you get from staff who absent-mindedly deleted that email with the attachment they needed? I’ve been guilty of this myself! On the blog, everything is categorized and archived by month so the assembly schedule we used in October is still there when we need it again in January.

  • Information is searchable. Technically, email is searchable, too, but if you’ve ever used FirstClass as your email client you’ll know that this is less than ideal. Plus, with the small mailbox sizes we are allocated, and the wonky way FC duplicates emails when you reply or forward, people tend to delete stuff.

  • Comments are way more efficient than emailing. This one was a bit unexpected, but it’s probably the biggest benefit. Say you post about an upcoming event and you omit an important piece of information. If you had emailed it, you’d get 10 or 15 emails asking for clarification and you’d have to either reply to each one or send one of those, “Oops! I’m sorry I forgot to tell you that Friday’s dance has an 80s theme…” emails. On the blog, one person asks the question in the comments and I can answer it once,

Overall, I think this has been a successful experiment. I think one of the primary reasons is that I articulated the purpose clearly as a reduction in wasted meeting time. Also, the cold-turkey approach was the only way to go. I don’t think this would have worked as effectively had I continued to send emails and post on the blog.

It didn’t take long for the hold-outs to come around when there was something they didn’t know about. I overheard more than one conversation along the lines of, “How did you know about [whatever]?”

“It was posted on the blog yesterday. Don’t you check it?”

Also, as with the team blogs, support is critical. This was new for people so hand-holding was critical for some while some were off and running right away. Some people stress out very easily because they “just aren’t good with technology” so it’s critical to support them in the early stages.

At this point in the year, there are four of us who have rights to post on the staff blog. I want to expand this next year to make it even more collaborative and to reinforce it as the “one-stop shop” for all things school related.

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