The Only Constant is Change
No matter how hard we try, we simply cannot make things stay the way they used to be.  That was made very clear to me last Saturday night. When I was younger, Halloween was a neighborhood event.  My friends and I would dress up and walk from house to house around our neighborhood.  We would rake in a tons of great candy within a few short minutes and then go home to enjoy our cache. When my kids were younger, we took them in the car to various neighborhoods and walked up and down the street with them while they knocked on the doors of strangers asking for treats.  They loved it, of course.  We made sure they got to the grandparents’ house to show off the

A Tale of Two Classrooms
Today I did two workshops for Sullivan County in the North East corner of Tennessee.  It was a great day with several hundred teachers in attendance.  My workshops included a session on Skype and one on the DE Streaming Builders. When I walked into the room provided, I was a little confused.  There was a screen rolled up on the wall, but there was no projector, no electrical cords, no Internet cable, no….well, there wasn’t much.  Since I was confused, I decided to see if every room was like this. I walked out of the language arts room assigned to me and into the one next door.  In that room was a bright, shining SMART board hanging on the wall and a project

How’s That Workin’ For Ya?
I completed my administrator’s certification a couple of years ago.  Since then I have looked closely at how current administrators do their jobs.  You know, personality types and such.  It has been interesting to say the least.  Kind of like being a mall watcher (or stalker I suppose). We have two middle schools in our district.  Both have the same quality of teachers.  They each have the same quality of student (pretty much, although one has a significantly higher level of free or reduced lunch children).  They are very different architecturally.  One is a self-contained building while the other is a series of separate “pods” for each team.  They are a

Following Directions
Every once in a while I just have to use this blog to vent.  Today is one of those days. I am giving DE Assessment make-ups today.  I’ve got kids from all over campus coming into my room to take, or finish, the English or Math assessments.  Sounds easy right?  Not if the server at your school goes down overnight it isn’t.  We can still get Internet access, but we can’t get to anything located on our server drives.  No problem for this assessment.  Or so I thought. I used my monitoring software, NetSupport, to turn all my machines on this morning and then tried to log them all in.  I sat and watched as the big red “N” of our Novell login

The Candle Problem
Dan Pink has done it again.  In a concise TED Talk, he explodes the myth that extrinsic rewards work as incentives to make people more productive in the work place. He begins with an experiment called “The Candle Problem.”  Subjects are given a candle, matches, and a box filled with tacks all sitting on a table.  Their job is simple: find a way to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax will not drip on the table.  They try everything.  Finally, when they are able to see everything in a different light, they figure out to use the tacks to attach the box to the wall and set the candle in the box.  The purpose of the box is often hidden because it ap