Education Recoded

Imagine that someone offered you something and said, "This might give you a short-term performance boost. If it does, we're not sure how long the effect will last but we know it will diminish over time. The boost might be just a year or two and it's all but certain that it won't last more than ... Read More

What trait will serve you the most as a school leader? There is no shortage of lists extolling the most important knowledge, skills, and abilities that school leaders should hold. Twenty years ago SEDL suggested that the following six traits were key for leaders to possess in order to facilitate ... Read More

Researchers in the field of school technology leadership are focused on how technology changes education (for better or worse) and how leaders can ameliorate those changes. With the exception of the field of information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) that is focused ... Read More

[Warning: Long post ahead] Yesterday I took the ACT college entrance exam for the first time. At age 44. It all started with Ira Socol's blog post, which argued that if politicians think that the standardized tests they are espousing are so important, they had better be able to pass those ... Read More

As a Director for the Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), I am often asked, what are some must-have tools for school administrators? Well, here are my favorites in no particular order. Dropbox. Online storage is a must for any busy administrator. You no ... Read More

One of my favorite books on leadership is The Future of Management by Gary Hamel. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so. You can read my book review but the essential premise is that current management models, which are centered on control and efficiency, are extremely ill-suited for an ... Read More

This past week, John Nash (fellow author of Education Recoded) and I have had the pleasure of presenting to faculty and students at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We have been talking about the impact technology has on education and the dire need for technology leadership. I ... Read More

If your school is planning to implement a one-to-one computer or tablet initiative, chances are a committee has been formed to plan, refine and ultimately kick off the initiative. Sometimes teacher-led committees get stuck. Here are two techniques members of a committee can use: one to help focus ... Read More

International schools are often on the cutting edge of technology use in their schools. In fact, when I think of innovative schools, I often think of international schools. When I read Will Richardson's Bold Schools post, I thought international schools would definitely epitomize these bold school ... Read More

A teacher friend of mine wrote me recently. She said that her school was working on bringing in iPads for grades six and seven next year and asked if I find that schools prefer laptops to iPads when moving to a 1:1 device environment. That’s a question our center gets quite a bit. In the end ... Read More

How do you transform factory era school systems so that they better serve the needs of an information age society? You don't do it by being timid. Unlike most school reformers floating 'tweak-the-status-quo' proposals these days (let's test kids more! let's get rid of a few teachers! let's make ... Read More

There is a prevailing conception that students must learn facts and procedural knowledge BEFORE they can then engage in so-called 'higher-order' thinking skills. Educators, parents, policymakers, online commentators, and others point to Bloom's taxonomy (which typically has been portrayed as a ... Read More

There is no shortage of effort in the United States today to infuse school leadership teams with the knowledge, skills and abilities to create improvements in schools. But one example is the work being taken on in several states to have schools embrace six design principles, known as “critical ... Read More

Question: What do VCRs, Betamax players, condom use in Thailand, and hybrid corn seeds in Iowa have in common? Answer: The adoption of these innovations each followed a logical, predictable framework that can be applied to (most) any innovation. The Diffusion of Innovations theory has been ... Read More

There are a noticeable lack of degree opportunities focused on the leadership side of school technology. Here at CASTLE, we're dedicated to remedying that deficiency. To that end, we recently launched a new graduate certificate, Master's degree, and Ph.D. in School Technology Leadership here at the ... Read More