Leaders of our organizations today play a large role in role modeling for others and easing the adoption of new ideas. Many school administrators who wish to implement more technology into the school district should start by demonstrating it themselves. This can be accomplished by having a school wide blog that can be used to communicate to the public, teachers, and other support personnel. Once teachers feel that the administrator is on board they are much more likely to adopt the new technology.
Blogs are a very critical piece to implementing technology to facilitate good communication between the community, teachers, and students. Blogs can replace email messages and they have syndication technology that automatically updates followers of any new information. This would be very beneficial to teachers looking to post new assignments for students or to send an itinerary to parents for an upcoming field trip.
Blogs are especially important for school administrators because they are an effective and cost efficient medium in which to communicate with the public and garner support for upcoming events and issues the school may be facing. In addition to blogging, open source software systems such as Linux are excellent additions for any school district. They provide many of the same applications of commercial software for free.
If your school district is still behind the times try conveying to your administrator the importance of these new Web 2.0 features.
7:48 pm - 10-12-2010
I think that administrators main role is to model the new technologies for teachers. I do not think that they have to be experts with the technology but by modeling the technology to the staff, they expose the staff to the technology. The Administrators should push staff to use the new technologies that are out there. By modeling the technologies you can help expose staff to the technology thus, creating a more technologic learning environment.
6:44 am - 10-17-2010
Wonder how long blogs will be around?