leadership in high schools

REQUIREMENTS:  TEACHERS WHO BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE TEACHING THE NEXT WAVE OF EMPLOYEES WHO WILL NEED 21ST CENTURY WORK SKILLS IN ORDER TO BE COMPETIVE.

TEACHERS WHO BELIEVE THAT OUR DEMOCRACY RESTS ON THE NOTION THAT WITHOUT AN EDUCATED WORKFORCE, OUR COUNTRY’S ECONOMY AND STANDARD OF LIVING ARE AT STAKE. 

•  Identify the core group of teachers who are already familiar with the virtual world.  The school principal must be involved in the training process in order to model “new learner fear” and take the place of teacher/coach/simultaneous learner with faculty.
• Include  IT specialists within this core group.
• Decide on the goal.  Does the teacher want to be the sole proprietor of the blog thereby controlling it, its content and exposure or will students own the blog as a response “notebook” to classroom assignments. 
•  A teacher can start a blog to increase stage 1 awareness and improve written response from students.  A teacher can also get students to develop the blog based on his/her needs.  This process would involve exploration of widgets, design, outreach etc. 
• A teacher can get students to set up their own blogs which will be a chronicle of student work in response to classroom expectations.  For instance the English teacher have students set up an individual blog that will respond to all English assignments throughout high school.  In this case the blog will become an interactive tool between the teacher and the students.  In addition this blog will show the progression of students thought, communication, rationale, and growth in web 2.9 skills over time.  I call this stage 2.  In this stage the blog will become a portfolio which the student can take with him/her after graduation and maintain as a historical memento to be referenced later in life.  Perhaps the student gets an interview with a college to review admission, this portfolio of work can be referenced electronically and perhaps clinch the scholarship and college admission.  Is this cool or what? 
• The Principal of the school should set up professional development time devoted to blog development.  The first few meetings will be devoted to general introductions using a video data projector and laptop. Walk through the process using Edublogs which is a very user friendly tool. 
• This training room should be open daily with prescribed times during which teachers can come in and work with a trainer to ask questions.  This training room would accommodate different learning curves.
• As teachers feel more comfortable, they will be able to leave the training room and return to their computers to develop their blogs.
• The core group of trainers or specialists will then be responsible for doing door to door sales asking if teachers have questions and need help.

In the above model, all teachers with be exposed to the technology plan.  Over the first 5  week period all teachers at the high school and middle school level working with computers in their classrooms will be encouraged and trained in the beginning level of web 2.0 technologies. 

Blog development will be shared with parents so as to bring them on board with the idea. 

This training and outreach should occur weekly during scheduled Faculty meeting time and involve door to door salesmen and women who belong to the core group, and will go around meetingasking if teachers need help in their classrooms as they develop their blogs,