In the current age of accountability, most school systems are drowning in a sea of numbers that need to be evaluated and interpreted. In fact, these days the old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” might need a slight rephrase to include “numbers”. While the application of visualizations to help analyze data can range from a simple and well-designed line chart in an office productivity application to specialized applications that focus on interpreting multivariate data, implementing visualizations to analyze data is within the reach of all school systems. Visualization guru Stephen Few offers that “computers speed the process of information handling, but they don't tell us what the information means or how to communicate its meaning to decision makers. These skills are not intuitive; they rely largely on analysis and presentation skills that must be learned.” Savvy knowledge workers are incorporating a variety of visualization tools to help better understand what their data is trying to tell them.

As professional educators in the 21st Century, it is our responsibility to continue to find ways to cultivate our digital students. A great way to do this is by starting an eAmbassador program. The goal of an eAmbassador program is to help students become proficient with 21st Century technology skills, tools and methodologies. This program can be aligned to the curriculum and help foster a strong sense of technology awareness. Through this program students will be able to advance their level of technical skills while assisting other students and teachers with computer skill development.

In the last article on 21st Century learners, we took a look at how to motivate, challenge and support digital students. This time we'll focus on strategies for assessment. It is crucial to assess digital students to ensure the tools they are using are in fact supporting learning. Assessing 21st Century learners establishes a baseline for measuring progress toward technology literacy goals. Assessment can also provide data to inform a school district’s design and delivery of curriculum and professional development resources.

Anyone who plays the lottery wonders what it would be like to hit the jackpot. Questions arise from these daydreams such as, What would I do first? What would I buy that I have always wanted? and How fast can I tell my boss that I quit?

Imagining what life in the schools would be like with the ideal technology staffing solution sometimes seems like the same type of opportunistic daydream. If funding were not a roadblock and attracting and retaining the best candidates was a given, what might an ideal technology staff in a typical school district look like?

Students Can Be Co-Creators, from Shakespeare to YouTube

Teachers often think that they have to create all of their classroom materials. If teachers can specify the learning goal and the type material that they want, give the students an example, and give those students ample time such as a week to find or produce the material, then students can create many classroom resources.

What can be done to improve students' learning in a wiki? Here are several techniques that you can use immediately to increase the learning in your wiki. These techniques are based on the experiences of this author who has used wikis for numerous semesters in his classes and on conversations with educators who use wikis in their classes.

What do we really know about today’s youth? As educators, do we truly understand how they think, learn, communicate, and socialize? As if you didn’t know by now, they don’t perform any of the aforementioned skills in any manner like the youth of years past. Our students live in a digital world, altered by ever-changing technology. The youth of today can instant message on their laptop, talk on a cell phone, play a video game wirelessly with a friend down the street and chew bubble gum - all at the same time.

Many educators, over the past couple of years, have had the chance to participate in a number of online synchronous professional development sessions, commonly called Webinars. Vendors often give product walk-through presentations using the WebEx online conferencing program. The International Society for Technology in Education presents professional development sessions using Adobe Connect, another Web-based presentation software. Other districts and educational agencies choose Elluminate as their presentation platform. Each of these products has similar components—they allow the participants to view a presentation, chat in a chat window to ask questions or make a comment, create polls to collect data from the participants in real-time, and sometimes even allow the use of a microphone in addition to a chat window. Usually, the sessions are recorded and archived so participants can go back and review the presentation or share it with others in their professional learning community.

This is Part Two in our series, "Technology Directors Leadership."

Leading a school district’s technology program is not for the faint of heart. There is never enough time in the day or money in the budget to solve all the problems. A key factor to helping manage the onslaught of issues is a strong and supportive team. With all the changes and demands of integrating technology across the range of district functions, support staff for technology are assuming a growing number of roles. Gone are the days when the technology team simply repaired equipment, provided training and managed network users. Those specialized activities have been replaced by a myriad of tasks more “mission critical” than ever to the success of a school district. Much emphasis is placed on developing and supporting our teachers and administrative leaders - and technology staff should not be overlooked. Spending time to reflect on the care and development of your technology staff should be a part of the planning process for every district technology leader. From improving departmental coverage to helping staff attain their professional goals, there is no shortage of areas on which to focus.

Check out these recent releases from top education publishers!

I'm going to share my favorite tool of late: "Cover It Live." In short, it's a quick and slick way to blog live events. But it can be so much more...

Remember the scene in the movie, “The Jerk,” when Steve Martin rejoices because his name is printed in the new phone book? Remember, also, that his joy heads South rather quickly? Let's face it: Initially, we all get a thrill when we see our name in print, see that someone has linked to our blog or mentioned us in their own blog. Eventually, this charge wears off and we realize our "15 minutes" is now par for the course and that there is something more important than fleeting digital recognition.

There has been a long running discussion about Wikipedia's role in schools. Both sides of the argument make their way into the media on a regular basis, i.e., pro-example #1 and con-example #2 and will, I believe, for quite some time. For the record: I advocate for Wikipedia's inclusion in the classroom for many reasons, but most notably to allow students the experience of grappling with the inherent pitfalls of the tool with support from their teachers. Having said that, certain precautions need to be taken for younger children in order to maintain safety (capturing web pages rather than taking students to pages "live"). To me, Wikipedia is a gift when teaching students research skills as it stresses the importance of checking validity and using multiple sources ---skills that should be taught with or without Wikipedia.

Previously, I wrote about RFP Misery and introduced GrantSuccess, my system for creating three prewriting documents to guide grant application development. Here, I will introduce writing tips that should help novice grant writers improve the quality of their grant applications.

RFP stands for Request for Funding Proposal. The RFP is the official document that funding agencies create to guide the grant application process. RFPs can be daunting; a federal RFP may run as many as 80-100 pages of new-to-you terminology, laid out in a 10-12 point font. RFPs are like bad relatives: They come at the wrong time, they require incredible attention, they stay too long, and they can’t be gone soon enough. In short, they can be true misery.

Novice grant writers usually charge into RFPs (Requests for Funding Proposals) with the naïve daring of a skydiver with no parachute. They jump in, not realizing how complicated RFPs can be or how much information needs to be managed in order to create a successful grant application. They think they can just memorize everything in the RFP and start writing their application. Big mistake. No way will they remember everything in the RFP, and a hasty start often results in an unsuccessful grant application. They miss little things that are really big things. For example, in a recent Ohio eTech RFP, each applying school district was required to send someone to evaluate the submitted grant applications. The applicants didn’t notice this requirement deep in the RFP; they were awarded over $100,000 only to have the award voided because they did not provide an evaluator. Oops!