Management vs. Leadership
After listening to Dr. Newberry's podcast on the characteristics describing a school's manager of technology and a school's leader of technology, I was able to think immediately of two people at my school who fit these descriptions.
The first person acts in the role of an administrator at my school and is definitely a leader of technology. She attends trainings for the uses of new technology, attends conferences where new technology is introduced and demonstrated, and advocates for the purchasing of new technology at our school whenever possible. She helped to acquire the funds to purchase new flat screen LCD monitors for our math lab because she understood how much strain students' eyes were going through after spending countless hours on MyMathLab working on their homework, and then having the concentration problems associated from trying to read the older monitors with the glaring screens. (and trying to understand math at the same time!) Now we have anti-glare LCD monitors in our math lab for every computer.
She is also the person at our school who schedules, monitors, and sometimes leads trainings and workshops in our faculty innovation center. This is the place on campus where faculty and staff can go for training on how to use new technology that the school has purchased, or on how to use the software on the school's computers. Because of this person's involvement, there are usually 20-30 trainings or workshops held each month at various times of the day. If these scheduled times and days are not convenient, this administrator will make appointments to have someone train faculty and staff one on one at scheduled times.
Finally, PowerPoint is always a part of the presentations that this person gives at our meetings. There are always graphics, animations, videos, audio clips, etc. added to the presentation to keep the audience interested and awake. You can definitely tell that this person is on top of things when it comes to technology.
I know of another administrator who is actually in a higher position at our school who is more of a manager of the school than a leader in technology. I honestly believe that this administrator believes that sending emails with attachments is using technology to its fullest. Like Dr. Newberry mentioned in the podcast, this individual is very good at the paperwork aspect of running a college, and is definitely a very good manager of the college. However, when it comes to technology, this person merely supports the use of technology at our school. He also makes sure that our technology is working properly and is up to date by checking with our "leader of technology" administrator. Whatever she says, he usually goes along with. He supports our trainings for the use of new technology at our school. Actually, sometimes he is a participant in the trainings himself, but usually that is very seldom.
The meetings and presentations that this administration manager has usually involves the use of transparencies he has prepare on his computer which he presents to the faculty and staff with an overhead projector. I have never seen a PowerPoint presentation given by this administrator that he has prepared himself. These types of characteristics show his weakness in the use of technology. However, as already mentioned, he is a very good manager of the school and listens to everyone's ideas about the use of technology. He usually listens to sales pitches about the best practices of using technology to improve the instruction at our college, but he will not go out and investigate which technology would be the best for our students.
Therefore, my definition of a manager is someone who can do the everyday tasks of paperwork, organizing, maintaining the status quo, and run a school. They basically know what makes a school work and keep it working in an efficient manner. A leader of technology is someone that can do all of that in addition to examing the ways to improve the instruction and learning environment of the school through the uses of technology.
My activity log for this week is as follows:
Monday, January 15th: logged into blackboard and downloaded Dr. Newberry's podcast. Since this day was a holiday at our college, I had more time to start transcribing the lecture in my notebook.
Tuesday, January 16th: finished transcribing the lecture. Starting thinking about how to write the blog entry for this week. Also wrote an email requesting our remote responders from our math chair so I could investigate how to use these tools as part of my first project.
Wednesday, January 17th: started reading other classmates blog posts.
Thursday, January 18th: received the manual, receiver and remote responders from the chair of math. I will take these home and over the weekend start reading the manual and see if I can figure out how to use this technology. Also I responded to Dale and Rosa's blogs.
Friday, January 19th: wrote this entry into my blog for session 2 this week. Started reading the manuals for the responders. I will begin my proposals for my first 2 projects.
Saturday, January 20th: continue reading blog posts from other students. I will continue working on my project proposals for my first two projects, and will try to figure out how to tie this together with project 3.
Sunday, January 21st: continue commenting on blog posts from other students. Continue working on project proposals. Will send an email to Dr. Newberry regarding the possible projects.
Project Ideas so far
Project One: Using techology to increase our personal effectiveness in our own role as well as being a model for others to follow.
I plan on learning how to use the PRS (personal response system) software and responders that our college has purchased but nobody has bother to learn to use. They have been sitting on a shelf for over 6 months and I am going to learn how to use these clicking devices for sessions in my math class. I will present a PowerPoint lecture presentation and my plan for using it in the classroom and if successful, I will create a video of this actually in use.
Project Two: Communicating to others information about the effective use of techology including training and guiding others to use technology effectively.
I plan on using Camtasia to actually create three short (10 minutes) training videos of how to use these responders. I could create or possibly use the same video of the students using these responders to help sells this idea to other faculty members.
Project Three: Supporting the effective use of techology through planning for technology use, promoting technology use, staff development, infrastructure and up keep.
I plan to draw up a technology plan as if I were recommending on buying more of these units. My plan would be similar to a purchasing proposal with a needs analysis, learner analysis and context analysis and state clearly why it would be important to purchase these responders or make the students purchase them as part of their required materials.
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6 comments:
Good comparision between the two people at your school and their types of presentations. That presents a very good picture--the difference between someone using all the resources and someone still using 20 year old technology. I had an instructor at CSUSB who loved his transparencies, always uses about a 10 font, lots of writing, likes either yellow or red transparencies and they were never quite in focus. And he had difficulty lining up the overhead with the screen, so half the print was on the wall. It was a painful class.
Hi James,
Great use of comparsion between the management role and the leadership role. I was interested to see how things maybe run at the university level. After reading your post, I was surprised to see that it wasn't that much different from that of the public school system. Great job!
Hey James, enjoyed your comparison. I will say that a Technology Leader may not always be someone who uses PowerPoint (per say) to present information in a meeting. To me a real leader would be pushing the boundaries a little, using new technologies, software, innovating a little on their own to combine some technologies. I think PowerPoint has actually become somewhat mainstream and true leaders should move beyond simply the presentation. Maybe they should be the ones that create more packages to distribute to ther to support their presentations, or creating a self-interactive PowerPoint Movie that can be posted, etc. What do you think? Maybe even someone who tries alternatives to PowerPoint to get better results . . . ?
Hi James!
Do you think your administrator would be willing to come to my school and act as an administrator? Just kidding, but it is interesting to note that anytime any of my administrators need to attend a training on a specific tehnological program, they need to "ask questions so that I sound like I know what I am talking about". Hmm... leader or manager?
Good job! I like the way you integrated your activity report right into your session blog posting. Your project ideas sound good. I especially like your focus 2 project using Camtasia. I use this to develop instruction myself and I like it a lot.
Very thorough post. I liked hearing about the people at your school site. It made the reading more interesting.
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