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The Top Ten Things Leaders Can Do Right NOW

1. Hold yourself and your staff accountable.
2. Motivate and promote with celebrations.
3. Manage frustration.
4. Support teachers to be risk-takers with PBL and technology tools.
5. Create a culture of collaboration.
6. Promote a 3-D culture: Data-Driven Decision-making even with PBL & 4 C's.
7. Practice the 3 E's: Create extraordinary experiences for everyone.
8. Generate energy.
9. Inspire audacity.
10. Cultivate love.

Into the Stratosphere

What is technology's role in education? Personal devices provide an environment where children can collect information in multiple formats and organize, play, visualize, and discover relationships among facts and events. Students can then use the same technologies to communicate their ideas to others, to argue and critique their beliefs, to persuade and teach others, and to add greater levels of understanding to their own growing knowledge. Simply put, technology provides more children more ways to learn. These same experiences provide the skills that will enable students to live productive lives in the global, digital, information-based future they all face.

In the old Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow model, the expectations were that teachers would have new roles, new instructional practices, new ideas about assessment, an openness to system change. What ACOT discovered, however, was that technology had an even greater impact than imagined. For example, technology:
  • encourages fundamentally different forms of interactions among students and between students and teachers;
  • engages students systematically in higher-order cognitive tasks; and
  • prompts teachers to question old assumptions about instruction and learning.

Technology stands out in our classrooms as a symbol to teachers, parents, and students that schooling can and will change, that classrooms may have some bearing on the 21st century after all.