"In a rapidly changing world, where the answers to questions are going to be changing, then what our children know will be less important than what they know how to do with it." – David Warlick I find the quote from Warlick to be inspiring and depressing at the same time. I know the quote to be true, yet I have been working in a system that will not see it’s truth, in fact, it seems to ignore that truth in the face of overwhelming evidence of the need for change. We become more and more focused on standardized testing and the pretesting to prepare for standardized testing and the testing to predict the outcome of testing. It’s like being trapped in a rat maze with the same old stinky cheese that you know is rancid, but you are still driven to seek the cheese by some primordial genetic instinct. All the information about our rapidly changing world of technology and communication tells us that the jobs our new incoming kindergarteners are training for do not even exist now. New jobs and job descriptions are arriving everyday. Librarians are becoming a thing of the past and now we have library media specialists. Just last month I was talking to someone about a new job that did not even exist when I went to college, an information systems architect, which is becoming a more needed field as businesses try to remake their information infrastructure in this evermore increasing technological world.
The new ways of looking at information and summarizing that information are almost unknown in many school buildings and those that are often discovered can not be used to their full potential if the teachers and administrators do not fully understand them. Tag Clouds, are a great example, my personal favorite being Tagxedo. In schools, they are often used as just an interesting graphic element created specifically for their visual appeal by repeatedly copying and pasting the element that you want to appear larger.
The true use of a tag cloud, to have the ideas from text jump out at the consumer, is not even touched on. Yet often as teachers we create newsletters, pamphlets, syllabi, webpages and policies that need to be examined, both on the classroom level and at the building level. We have been working in our building to rewrite several building policies and on my own I tagged several of them and it really helped me to see which were more in need of revision, because the cloud definitely sent the wrong message, or at least, not the message we meant to send. It made me wonder, what message my blog would send so I tagged that, and realized that the great thing about a blog is that it is constantly changing and adding new ideas and thoughts and evolving and that after this post, another new tag cloud could be generated with the new ideas included. I’m not really a big blogger and I wondered what the cloud would say about me and I thought it was great that the words that jumped out were “students, share, use, information.” As the new data leader in our building next year I will be in a unique position to introduce these new ways of looking at data and generating data. Our homework policy and tardy policy are two policies that are revisited each year and they both lend themselves well to examination with a tag cloud. I am putting together my first professional development experience to share with my staff at the beginning of the year and I am excited about how they will take the idea and apply it to their own practice after we have used it to examine our homework policy and rewrite the tardy policy. Our homework policy gives a good message in a cloud, but a rather traditional one that might need some mention of technology and sharing of information. The tardy policy was a disaster, and having lived through the practice and implementation of those policies I would say that those conclusions are spot on! I am looking forward to working with the teachers (my students) in the building next year and expanding their horizons with how we examine policy and think about the message that those policies send to our parents, students and community. -N