Multi-faceted Refractions

For the last seven years, the switch to Daylight Savings time has either occurred during our Spring Break, either in the middle weekend or the last weekend. This is one of the benefits of a two week break. This means that my internal clock has had a chance to adjust to the fact it is darker in the morning, making it harder to wake up. I definately enjoy the benefits of having daylight longer.

The switch during the final weeks before Spring Break, with our yearbook deadlines and our Science Olympiad Regional event, which this year was a 15 hour day on Saturday has taken its toll on me over these first two days. I cannot wait until I get adjusted.

I have been involved in two major projects, one professional and one personal which have eaten all of my time over the past week. I am the adviser to our school’s yearbook, the Mirror. Our final deadline to get this year’s edition to the plant in order to guarantee our spring delivery is today, February 28th. Most of my available time, during the school day, the evenings, and the weekend have been devoted to guiding our students through crunch time. It looks like we will have have 80% of the book in today, with the remaining 20% completed over the weekend.

My wife, who is an elementary school music teacher  in two different school districts, had the second of the four performances she is responsible for directing last evening. This one was her First Grade Program. I have been helping her edit her program, make a banner for the back of the stage, making sure videotaping and cameras were charged, and videotaping and lending as much support as I can. In addition, she is working on her third performance, a musical in her other school, so I am also cooking, cleaning, and trying to help with other household duties.

Tomorrow I am attending the Illinois Technology Conference for Educators in St. Charles. I will miss meeting up with Cheryl Toledo, who is coordinating the EduBloggerCon group gathering this evening.

I do have multiple new projects to report on, including an update on the Parting Waters Project, the Sound Poem project, and our Fifth Grade Mayan Project using Google Sketchup.

I ask you to be patient and return back soon, hopefully as early as this weekend when I have a chance to catch up and breathe.

I have settled into a routine over the past six to seven weeks, kind of a personal Professional Learning Tuesday, where I spend a significant amount of listening time over at EdTechTalk.com. I have a hectic morning with scheduled meetings and classes. I then try to settle in to listen to Alex Ragone (Learning Blog) and Arvind Grover (21 Apples) on their webcast, 21st Century Learning at 12:30 p.m. They have great guests and since they are also independent school educators, provide prospectives on issues that we are wrestling with daily.

In the evening, I settle down to listen to the Women of Web 2.0, a conversation moderated by Vicki Davis (Cool Cat Teacher), Jennifer Wagner (Technospud), Sharon Peters (Musing About Teaching High School, Social Computing and Ed Tech), and Cheryl Oakes (cheryloakes.com). They have been interviewing great thinkers and educational leaders, such as Terry Friedman and Julie Lindsay.

Yesterday was a bit different. I listened to the Women of Web 2.0 while editing yearbook pages, as our final deadline is less than one week away, and instead of just listening to Alex and Arvind, I had the pleasure of being their guest. We had a great conversation about the powerful role that parents play in partnering with Ed Tech educators, since students spend more time outside of school than in school, and the need to educate parents about the new issues surrounding the new tools, so that parents can make informed decisions about their children’s use of technology rather than ones our of ignorance or naiveté. It was amazing how quickly an hour plus disappeared when engaged in great conversation. I had a great time and am really honored that they asked me to participate in the conversation.

Now, time to deal with  a wacky Wednesday.

One of the responsibilities, in addition to being the Director of Academic Technology, is being the lead advisor on our school’s yearbook, the Mirror. I love working with students to document and develop a journalistic approach to document and tell the story of the year’s events. Creating this “old fashioned” print record is an interesting juxtaposition to providing leadership in using emerging the new Web 2.0 methods of documenting and communicating.

Each year, we pick a concept or a theme to use as a prism to view the year’s events. This year, we have selected the concept of community as this years view. We are attempting to break tradition and create the look and feel of a magazine in our layouts, doing such things as placing ads throughout the book. As the lead advisor, I am taking the opportunity to use my advisor’s note, that I put in each year, to set the tone and define our goals for the book. Since we are nearing our final deadline on February 28th, I sat down and finished my good draft of the document. I am sharing it here so that we can all begin to have conversations around the concept of what defines the communities which we belong to. Without further ado, here are my thoughts:

Whenever someone talks about North Shore, invariably, the conversation includes the word community. It is used so frequently that one of the editorial team, when discussing the possibility choosing this as our theme for this year’s edition of the Mirror, stated honestly, “When I hear the word community anymore, I tuned out because it is used all of the time.” Various different adjectives are used to describe North Shore’s community, such as inclusive, warm, engaging, diverse, welcoming, and open. But does everyone share the same definition of community? If you were to poll the one thousand members of the North Shore community about the definition, my guess is that you would find that there would be one thousand different variations of what is meant by community.

In the greater society outside North Shore, the concept of community is being challenged by multiple technological innovations. The emergence of Digital Social Networks, such as MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, Google Videos, blogs, podcasts have extended our opportunities to collaborate and communication with people down the street, across town, across the state, and internationally. This notion was so significant that Time magazine named the You, the individuals who are gathering in these new electronic communities as the 2006 Person of the Year.

So this year, we decided to document the events of the 2006-2007 academic year examining North Shore’s community. Using the three essential questions incorporated on the cover the book; what does community mean, what qualities of community make North Shore unique, and how do we know community when we look around, our goal was to go beyond simply covering the year, but to create that common definition of community that we can all agree with and use.
As we continued to develop the idea last spring, it became apparent that there were two characteristics that were crucial to the definition of North Shore’s community, membership and participation. Membership in the community and the various sub-communities. various classes, advisories, sports teams, ensembles, clubs at North Shore are paramount to our existence. At North Shore, we encourage students, parents, and teachers to gather together around common interests and goals. Without this shared membership, we cease to be neccisary.

But membership without participation would mean that the bonds which we create and renew each year would lose their importance. At North Shore, we encourage all to become active participants in all of the various groups that they claim membership in. We expect students to stretch themselves in all aspects of their lives, the academics, arts, and athletics. We are challenged daily to be both positive leaders and active, supportive members of groups.

This is the essence of the North Shore community. We have tried to capture these qualities in the following pages and I pleased with our results. I hope that you are too.

Like many of you, especially those of you who work at independent schools, you are asked to do a variety of different tasks. In my case, in addition to the responsibilities as the Director of Academic Technology (teaching one class per year, working with teachers to develop and deliver individual professional development plans, working with classes of students and teachers as they acquire the discrete sets of technology skills), I am a student adviser, I am the person responsible for creating our High School Master Schedule, I am one of the co-founders of our Middle School and High School Science Olympiad teams, and for the past four years, I am the adviser to our school’s yearbook, the Mirror.

At our school, the yearbook is an extra-curricular project. When I started four years ago, my editorial team and staff were one in the same, six outstanding seniors who were amongst the most active students at the school, involved in athletics, the dramatic productions, and many other outstanding opportunities that we provide for our students.

Although we have been more successful in growing the program by increasing the number of staff members who apprentice as underclassman, at this time our leadership team is comprised of seniors who are interested in telling the story and documenting the year, but do not have any previous experience with a project of this magnitude and importance.

This year, in addition to the lack of experience in the process, the leaders that I am working with are from three distinct groups. Part of the challenge at the beginning is to build a cohesive team that is able to work together able be able to tell a story from one common voice. I find it challenging to have the students leave strip away their biases and agendas when they enter the room.

Experience and failure are great motivators. There are five distinct deadlines that our plant requires us to meet, the first fairly light and then increasing in intensity. This year, I have opted to let the students fall short of the requirements expected in the deadline. It was during the adrenaline filled last three days that the realized the level of commitment required of the position. Now that we have come short, I believe theyare poised to accept the challenge ahead of them.

I wonder what strategies that others in similar positions employ in similar situations to mold a cohesive team of students ready to tackle a challenge such as this?