Today marked the end of an era at the North Shore Country Day School. After 12 years of faithful service, our help desk manager, Lori Brennan spent her last day at North Shore. A help desk manager is the first person that a user in crisis first contacts, whether it is a kindergartener trying to print their first masterpiece or seasoned faculty member whose hard drive crashed during the middle of writing report cards. To the user in crisis, their problem is always the most important issue that needs to be dealt with right away. One of Lori’s strengths that […]

Two weeks from tomorrow, our 2011-12 academic year will begin once again. In addition to classes and partnering with students and faculty, this will mean a series of meetings. Don’t get me wrong, it is essential to get groups of folks together so that progress can be made towards shared goals and initiative, but for me, there are times that these gatherings take time away from other tasks which require my time, energy, and attention. This past week, two different suggestions as to how to rethink these gatherings were published that resonate with me. The first is the new book […]

Yesterday, I returned home from a family vacation. 2000 miles, just the four of us. As I return home and begin to plug back into work and the network, I am realizing the benefits of a virtually technology-free time away from the daily grind. Unplugging allowed my thoughts to wander. After the first two days of withdrawal,  I became less anxious. I didn’t have to compelled to check email. Upon my return, I went through the essential work email, deleting and archiving away. I simply selected the 100+ emails in my personal email and archived them. If there is something important, […]

I am fortunate. This year, I am a recipient of a Parents Association grant. My grant will enable me to travel to a place that I have never been and have always wanted to go to, Cooperstown, New York. Many of you may not know that I am a huge baseball fan and amateur baseball historian. So for me, this will be a trip to Nirvana. I am blessed that I will be able to share this trip with my family. As such, this next week will be a week that I am primarily off of the grid. Very limited […]

This morning, when going through my tweet-stream, I was pointed to a blog post by Tim Holt’s post on the Powerful Learning Practice’s Voices from the Revolution blog, The 30 Minute Questions. Tim’s thoughts echos one of  both Kevin Honeycutt’s at the Leadership Symposium at ISTE and Jeff Utecht’s Laptop Institute messages In a typical school day, what 30 minutes will your students remember the most? This question is one which is powerful and needs to be asked and addressed. However, as we near the opening of schools in the next month in North America, I have had a similar […]