
explanation2.m4v
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Haw and hip brandy; haw brandy; sloe, blackberry and elderberry gin; sloe gin; sloe and blackberry gin; hedgerow brandy; Yuletide rowan brandy; 3 jars of Damson Chutney.
A few days ago I finally turned to some academic work that I had been putting off for a while. I turned off all my distractions – Tweetdeck, Googlemail, my phone, the tv. Then I sat in a quiet room and did the work using only a PDF of the arthcle I was studying and notepad on my laptop.
I had spent the week leading up to that being in charge of childcare, but nevertheless had grabbed a few minutes here and there to get some work done – planning, preparation, admin and the like. I had also held some really interesting conversations on Twitter, read some interesting blogs and responded to the odd e-mail. You may be wondering exactly how I care for my children, but it’s amazing what you can fo with CBeebies on in the room…
Somehow I’d never felt able to focus on the academic stuff with the kids about, and when I came to the study itself, I had also felt the necessity of turning off the online distractions.
I hadn’t thought conciously about that decision until today when I read a really good article in the Telegraph called ‘How the Internet is making us stupid’ by Nicholas Carr.
He has pulled together various bits of research that show how all the distractions we engage reduce the depth at which we think. We are becoming shallow thinkers.
He writes things like: ‘people who juggle many tasks are often less creative and less productive than those who do one thing at a time.’
And: ‘People who read text studded with links, the studies show, comprehend less than those who read words printed on pages.’
He also quotes developmental psychologist, Patricia Greenfeld who says that while ‘every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others’ there are ‘new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes.’
And Roman philosopher Seneca who said: ‘To be everywhere is to be nowhere.’
He goes on to quote neuroscientist Michael Merzenich who said that as our brains adapt to this shallow way of thinking, ‘the long term effect on the quality of our intellectual lives could be deadly.’
Now I’m not to sure about that. I think we need to be able adapt to different ways of thinking for different purposes, which is what I found the other evening when I successfully engaged in some study. But I do agree with him when he says that ‘skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought’. I’ve been guilty of spending too long in skimming mode recently and that whole way of thinking has stopped me from even being ready to attempt any academic study.
My conclusion
I must be determined not to let ‘skimming’ be my default mode and schedule myself time to engage in different types of thinking.
Do you agree with Carr’s article? Have you read any research that indicates the positive impacts on thinking of using social media?
Pavlov began it, thinking he could explain it with dogs.
Sometimes the ideal way forward isn’t the most time appropriate.
There is a saying about leadership:
Administration is ‘Doing Things’Management is ‘Doing Things Right’Leadership is ‘Doing the Right Things’
I’ve been experimenting with Google Calendar to make our systems more efficient. This term I’m turning to the school rotas.
Why Rotas?
It sounds a boring task, and it is, but getting the rotas right at the start of the year is essential to having an efficient year. It saves all those pointless conversations where people have to negotiate room usage and avoids all those embarrassing situations where two people, each with a class of 30 children, turn up at the Hall only to have their expectations and lesson plan dashed. Getting rotas right means the administrators in the office, who bear much of the difficult conversations in school can work confidently within the frameworks given to them. As these people often have the dual role of also being first contact for visitors it helps them stay positive and happy. The visitors also pick up on this mood and the school’s reputation improves.
Everything gets better with good rotas.
Tools
I love Google Calendar. I love the way it syncs so well with my phone and with so much other stuff. I also love the way you can collaborate with Google Spreadsheets – 50 people + on the new version it’s pretty impressive. So my initial idea was to generate the rotas by sitting together with the staff and a room full of laptops, type into events into a Google spreadsheet, and then import the data via a .csv file into Calendar. After some initial research and some sterling advice from fellow GCTs Danny Silva and Nic Finelli I soon dismissed this idea. I realised that getting the staff to accurately put their activities into a precise format onto Google Spreadsheets when some off them have had no prior experience of any kind of spreadsheet might be asking too much. It may be a challenge for the future. If you’re interested, the Google help page with the right format for importing into calendar is here.
Solution
So instead I’ve set up several calendars that describe everything we do in school. I’m intending to open up the calendars to the staff so they can edit them during the first week, set up the rotas, then I’ll take away their access rights so they can only see the calendars and they’ll be set. I’ll then transfer over the admin rights to the actual staff, so if any changes need to be made in the future they can be made through the staff in the admin office.
The rotas I need doing are:
In addition I created 3 separate calendars.
I still need a 4th Calendar to finish the jigsaw – the Foundation Stage Calendar – but I’m not sure what their calendar looks like and won’t get the details until next Tuesday. I need to have got the bulk of this sorted by then.
The Calendar Menu looks like this – several calendars that I can turn off and on and make available to different people.
The KS1 Calendar looks like this:
And with the KS2 Calendar and Assembly calender looks like this:
What next?
I need to plan how I’m going to explain to the staff how to put their events up. Each member of staff will have a certain number of events to fill in for each timetable, for example 2 for the Hall Timetable, 2 or 3 for the ICT suite. I’ll probably use a video to record that – I quite like Smart boards screen capture video software – it’s simple but effective. I’ll need to remember to invite each staff member to fill in the appropriate calendars too.
Over the next few days I’ll post my explanation video and after the training has been given, show some of the results of what happened.
[wpvideo RRwPANiT]
What’s you picture of how change works?