Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Change is challenging

The world's first tech support or, for community relations, bringing people into your transformation idea... (from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRBIVRwvUeE)



When I saw this video, I began to think, how do we get people to make changes? The old addage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" seems to be a working model for a lot of people with whom we may come in contact. For those of us who have been in the teaching profession for a while, we can remember a time when attendance and grades were always done by hand. (Possibly only the geeky math or computer teacher would do something using a spreadsheet...). Where you in the profession when the transition was made to electronic attendance and gradebooks? How much resistance was there? How many times did you hear the question, why do I have the change the way I am doing this? Or even better, I am retiring in 2 years, I am not going to change...


As I look at increasing community engagement, changing the public image of a district, or even incorporating technology into the classroom on a daily basis, there are some of the questions that I will have to address. It is funny that there are people out there that deny that evolution occurs and these are the same people who don't want to change with the times. Take a lesson from biology, species that fail to adapt to changing environments go extinct!

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