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My Ed Tech resolutions for 2010

It had to happen. Like the best-of and year-end wrapup posts, a resolutions post was inevitable.
Written by Christopher Dawson, Contributor

It had to happen. Like the best-of and year-end wrapup posts, a resolutions post was inevitable. Here goes...Be sure to share yours in the talkbacks and Happy New Year, folks!

  1. I will train my users better. It's all too easy to just adopt new technologies that make sense to me and forget that this is what I do for a living. The pace of change is so swift now, that I need to be a bit more empathetic with many of my users.
  2. I will do a better job of engaging a wide cross-section of users in the decisions I make. There aren't many tech folks in my district and it's easy to sit in my office and make decisions that seem great. I have to fully consider the ramifications for elementary teachers, or secretaries, or principals, or whomever, since most of the people in my district aren't geeky ex-high school math teachers.
  3. I will devote more time to data analysis. The new student growth models available to us, combined with a variety of other data points now allow for meaningful longitudinal data analysis. This is a capability that I've back-burnered for too long.
  4. I will make PR a priority. I know what I'm doing and I know why it's important. But in an age of school choice and the need for taxpayer support and understanding, a little PR can go a long ways.
  5. I will write more. For ZDNet, sure, but I have a book outlined that needs attention and I have a lot of users who could benefit from good documentation.
  6. I will embrace video. Readers will be seeing podcasts and videos; users in my day job will be seeing video versions of the documentation noted above.
  7. I will enable my users to make use of our Joomla! site to better disseminate information and communicate with the public. It's made our district website prettier; now I need to make it more useful.
  8. I will look for partnerships with our community. There are ways to save money and improve IT-related services by exploring partnerships with municipalities, libraries, etc. Many of you have created shared data centers, improved communications infrastructures, etc. It's time I at least started the dialog.
  9. I will expose my users to Linux in a variety of ways. I haven't quite figured out how to do this without jamming it down their throats, but there is money to be saved, a community to be supported, and great technology to explore.
  10. And last, but not least, I will learn to use and administer a new Moodle server that I'll be deploying; this is one of those technologies with which I'm very familiar in concept and press release, but not nearly familiar enough in practice. Time to roll it out.

And I thought I was busy this year. Sheesh.

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