Top 5 Blog Posts for 2010

The 21st Century Principal blog is almost a year old, and it has been quite an adventure. I have learned a great deal about blogging do’s and don’t’s in the past year, but I won’t bore everyone with those yet. Instead, I would like to share my Top 5 Five Blog Posts for 2010. Looking at my statistics, these were the posts that have been accessed the most during the course of this past year.

1. Could “Race to the Top” Be the Next Four-Letter Word After NCLB? In retrospect, when Race to the Top was announced, it made a large number of educators skeptical, including me. After enduring the ludicrousness of NCLB for the past several years, we are all afraid of having ed reform “done” to us again. Only time will tell whether this reform effort will truly make a difference.

2. Teacher Welcomes Texting in Classroom: 21st Administrators Need to Welcome Teacher Experimentation  This post includes a video of a teacher who thinks outside the box with texting. I said it, and I still mean it: Administrators need to support technology experimentation, and sometimes that means removing barriers to experimentation. And sometimes it means cleaning up a mess or two when the experiments don’t work. It’s called risk, and innovation must have it.

3. My Favorite 21st Century Administrator Tools as of Today: August 10, 2010 This post was a list of five  essential and mostly free technology tools that I still use now.  These tools are must-haves for school administrators. I might add a few more iPad apps to that list now though.

4. 5 Considerations for Allowing Students to Use Personal Computing Devices on School Wireless Networks With this post, I received a lot of emails regarding our policy for allowing students to use their own computers with our school wireless network. More and more schools are looking at providing students with this kind of access, and having procedures in place to make that happen are important.

5. Edmodo: Alternative Social Media Tool for Classrooms Using Facebook in schools makes many administrators and teachers a bit queasy due to all the security and privacy issues. This post is about Edmodo, an alternative social media solution. I have two teachers working with it now. It’s a fantastic tool.