Google Reader

First you will need to set up a Google account if you do not have one. Quick and easy - here is a short video on setting up an account.

A Google account enables you to make use of a number of applications - our interest here is in the Google Reader. With the Reader you can follow a number of blogs; the new posts from these blogs will all be in your Google Reader to scan. For a fun look at the concept of RSS feeds check out this video - or this specific to Google Reader

You are probably wondering where you'll find blogs to "feed your reader". One service is called Technorati.

Finally Back Again!

Again too long - I actually enjoy blogging and aim to get better at it!! Stumbled on to a new McLeod wiki -moving forward. This links goes to a page called Blogs; created in wikispaces, it looks straight forward. Many links to blogs and blog "vendors".
One blog vendor is 21 Classes - it provides a 2 layer arrangement; classroom level blog and then interconnected individual student blogs. A very limited free version - can create blogs for up to 10 students.
Recalled Scavo using Saywire -

Baldrige

I get to attend a half day workshop in May sponsored by the Iowa Quality Center. The Iowa center runs the Iowa Recognition for Performance Excellence - one of about 40 states that have a "baby Baldrige program". Most national winners have started their quality journey in a state program.

The workshop is called "The Making of a World-Class Organization". Two folks from Boeing will be conducting the workshop - Spong and Collard - their division of Boeing won the Baldrige Quality Award a few years ago. Yes they have a book too. Schools are organizations; can schools learn from outside their own sector? Baldrige folks (the genesis comes out of the quality movement) say absolutely! The framework will enable "any organization in any sector" to make large, sustainable, customer focused improvements. World Class eh? - that's what the Des Moines Register has been talking about for education in Iowa.

The Baldrige National Quality Program is administered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Links to the 1987 law that created the program and FAQ are available on the home page.

The Baldrige Awards are given to a few organizations each year. In 2008, 3 organizations were awarded the award. One has ties to Iowa - Cargill Corn Milling - with a large operation in Eddyville 10 miles south of Oskaloosa. A North Carolina school district (with a short 2-page summary of highlights) and a health system in Colorado also won Baldrige Awards in 2008.

The award started in 1988. The program initially had a real manufacturing focus. Service industries, health care, education, non-profit and governmental organizations have all gravitated to the Baldrige as a framework for achieving and sustaining organizational performance excellence.

The first education Baldrige winner was in 2001. This year's winner made a total of 8 awards to educational programs - some have been colleges. A complete list of all the winners and links to their application summaries are available. Information on each the K-12 winner are available - Chugach Schools, Pearl River, Community Consolidated and Jenks Public Schools, although called summaries - most are 50+ pages.

A short 3 minute video from one winner - the first governmental winner - an Army research and materials center (their full appplication - 50+ pages) :




The core of the Baldrige are the "Criteria for Performance Excellence". Education and health care each separate Criteria - the language is different - concepts are the same. Ex - customers in most organizations are known as students (and stakeholders) in education and patients in health care. The Criteria for education is a 92 page document. The link also has a self analysis resource.

The home page also has links to a self assessment tool and an "Are We Making Progress?" instrument. The Baldrige criteria has 7 components -
1 Leadership
2 Strategic Planning
3 Customer Focus
4 Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management
5 Workforce Focus
6 Process Management
7 Results

I'm excited about how we might use the framework at Future Pathways. I know our leadership team is committed to excellence; this approach is sound. It also takes a lot of work and disipline. No quick fixes; not much shooting from the hip. I've had the opportunity to be an examiner in both Minnesota and Iowa in previous lives. So exciting to be looking at it from education this time.

Tregoe Education Forum

Erin had a new book on her desk earlier this week, Analytic Processes for School Leaders. One co-author was Tregoe, one of the founders of Kepner-Tregoe. I studied their work back in 80's, The Rational Manager. Just discovered they did the NEW Rational Manager in the 90's. Missed that one, I guess.

The subtitle on the first one was "A Systematic Approach to Problem Solving and Decision Making". Pretty cool eh - I've always loved this kinda stuff? I always thought their work going back into the 50's would have been more studied in the 80's if we hadn't been so taken with the Japanese work and approaches.

Tregoe formed the Tregoe Education Forum in the 90's, my sense at the end of his distinguished career. I've supscribed to the newsletter and plan to keep track of this effort. On the site I found a great link to a quick organizational assessment tool - your Analytical Thinking Quotient.
Took it and it helped me think about the pay off to using their framework.

Some of the other material on the website was targeted to teachers and students. Yes, I think this type of material is needed to help meet the DMPS New Ends of critcial thinking, problem solving and decision making. I thought of our new Current Issues class - what opportunities - check out yourtake.org. I also thought of the systems thinking research I did a year ago. If we are serouis about helping our students learn these skills, but resources are available - and increasingly at no cost. Cost to learn and adapt - sure. Cost for the material - no to not much. I think of the Einstein quote on Creativity - "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

Little wonder that 21st Century skills have gotten relatively little action and only some attention. Up until recently, we've been flying pretty high. Things are GOOD - the exception being 9/11. Today we have a world economic crisis of unknown proportions and duration, we have North Korea playing with missles and nuclear weapons, we have a ship captain being help hostage off the coast of Somalia by pirates. NPR referred to this current type of pirate activity as the worst the world has seen since the Barbary Wars in the 1780's. Yes - we face "significant problems". Will our educational institutions respond with new levels of thinking or same-o same-o? Only we can decide.....

Wikis

I've played wikis for a couple of years using wikispaces. A wiki vendor, they give spaces to educational institutions. Another large supplier of wiki is called pbwiki; here is a link to public wikis that focus on 9-12 high school education. Scanning some of these will provide ideas on how some are using this tool in the secondary education. This link is to pbwiki resources - they are presented in a wiki format of course. I think of scanning some of these resources as equivalent to looking through a catalog to get ideas. They can help expand of horizons; to see new possibilities.

Spring Break

Spent spring break in Helena visiting my son and daughter-in-law - Pad and Nisan. I had a wonderful time- great little place.

My son is youth librarian at the library system in Helena. I discovered he had won the Little Miss Muffitt contest at the library (a staff function - assume an excuse for a pot luck and some laughs & creativity)

I was going to send pics to some of my co-workers at DMPS but they would have totally clogged up the e-mail system. Having NOT yet included single pics in my blog, it provided an obvious choice.

Spent Saturday at the Como Park zoo with friends, Rick and Sherry, and their grand kids. We saw giraffes, but NO elephants. Sent them these pics from Africa. The video is of Judy at a giraffe park; elephant picture is from our trip to Lake Manyara Nat'l Park in Tanzania in 2007.

My first slideflickr. The "Stop Math" pic uploaded from my computer from a digital camera, as are the xc skiing and church pics. A few others are from cellphone camera and sent directly into a flickr account using a flickr e-mail. Set up on slideflickr; it scrolls thru pics as a slide show. Don't think for a moment I figured this out on my own; I had help from Liz Kolb. She set up a great 5 minute tutorial using screen-cast-omatic; great step by step presentation - audio and broswer screen demo!




My first podcast using my cell, recording from NPR and uploading using Gcast. I chose auto play initially. I went back and changed to manual play.


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