All Hands on Deck

Making the Leap: Technology Is About A Mindset

My salon participants want to learn the tools. More important, they want to become comfortable with their computers, and be people who are comfortable with living in a digital world. Why is this so hard? There’s a leap involved, I think, and it’s one many people seem not to make, from the familiar world to a different kind of world, a different way of being […]

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Are You Teaching in Lonely School?

These comments rolled across my Twitter feed yesterday morning.   Every secondary classroom I’ve visited since the start of the pandemic is in the Lonely School. No faces on the Zoom or Google Meet screens. Few voices besides the teacher’s. Here’s how a couple of ninth graders recently described their experiences: “All my school is very different and separated right now.” “For some reason, I […]

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Google Docs & the Re-Making of the World

The second gathering of the Sunday Salon took place on Sunday at 4:00 p.m., instead of directly following worship. There were far fewer attendees this time; I chalked that up to an unusual-for-the Pacific-Northwest sunny-ish afternoon. (Here, even partial sunshine during the rainy season is enough to inspire people to get outside. This is especially bothersome when one is attempting a house remodel and the […]

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Introducing an Organization to the Web: In Which Google Docs Is the Star

Sunday Salon Begins! Sunday Salon had its official beginning on the second Sunday of January. Just under 20 people came into the Zoom room to see what Google Docs had to offer them, and our small (but mighty) communications committee joined in to add perspectives and a helping hand. Our plan was to start with a pep talk: You can’t break the internet! Just give it […]

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In Which We Create A Holy Maker Space*

[*Another in a collection of posts about the experience of leading an organization into the digital age.] We didn’t set out to turn the church upside down. We simply wanted to update the hardware and software, and then begin to move operations to the cloud. We wanted to show committee members how they could work from home and still share documents or update calendars. (They […]

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How to Future-focus ELA Teacher Candidates

Big Shifts for Deeper Learning When Scott McLeod, a professor of educational leadership, tweeted a chart of four big shifts future schools will need to make to truly prepare kids for the new future we live in today, I felt a little spark. I’m poking at that spark in this post, to see if there’s something I can use in my work with this year’s […]

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