Scott McLeod
Associate Professor of Educational Administration, Iowa State University
Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Kentucky. He also is the Founding Director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), the nation’s only academic center dedicated to the technology needs of school administrators, and was a co-creator of the wildly popular video series, Did You Know? (Shift Happens). He has received numerous national awards for his technology leadership work, including recognitions from the cable industry, Phi Delta Kappa, and the National School Boards Association. In Spring 2011 he was a Visiting Canterbury Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dr. McLeod blogs regularly about technology leadership issues at Dangerously Irrelevant and Mind Dump, and occasionally at The Huffington Post. He can be reached at scottmcleod.net.
A short essay argues that most institutions should immediately institute moratoriums on hiring new faculty and building new facilities, and that universities need to focus on clarifying their value proposition in a world of ‘commodity [higher] education.’
Laptops. iPads (or other tablet devices). Chromebooks. Maybe even netbooks or ultrabooks… As more schools and districts move toward 1:1 computing, one of the most common questions is ‘What device […]
Introducing a new feature here, here’s a school technology leadership scenario for you… SCENARIO: You’re a new central office administrator in a growing district. Just a few months into the […]
It’s 2012. Technology suffuses everything around us. The Internet and Internet browsers have been pretty mainstream for at least a decade. And yet, I continually run into significant numbers of […]
Marc Tucker, President and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy, had a blog post back in August titled Instructional Technology: Villain of the Piece – or Savior? In […]
Part 1. Monkeys There’s an apocryphal story about monkeys – based loosely on a real experiment – that goes something like this: Stage 1. Monkeys 1, 2, 3, 4, and […]
I was raised to honor our military. One of my grandfathers was a Marine sergeant during World War II. The other was an Army lifer who served in three wars […]
Imagine that someone offered you something and said, “This might give you a short-term performance boost. If it does, we’re not sure how long the effect will last but we […]
[Warning: Long post ahead] Yesterday I took the ACT college entrance exam for the first time. At age 44. It all started with Ira Socol’s blog post, which argued that […]
One of my favorite books on leadership is The Future of Management by Gary Hamel. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so. You can read my […]
How do you transform factory era school systems so that they better serve the needs of an information age society? You don’t do it by being timid. Unlike most school […]
There is a prevailing conception that students must learn facts and procedural knowledge BEFORE they can then engage in so-called ‘higher-order’ thinking skills. Educators, parents, policymakers, online commentators, and others […]
As soon as you say ‘failure is not an option,’ you’ve just said ‘innovation is not an option.’ – Seth Godin, The Flip Side Download this file: pngpptx See also […]
As was so aptly said just a few days ago: It is hard to make an argument that there are many desirable post-secondary educational or career scenarios for current high […]
Alberta, Canada is widely recognized as having one of the best schooling systems in the world. A recent article in Alberta Views highlighted the differences between its system and America’s, […]
Deron Durflinger, a high school principal in Van Meter, Iowa, says: We need a system that isn’t based on doing well on NAEP and PISA, but in which students are […]
Here’s a statement that I’m getting really tired of hearing: “We didn’t have computers when I was in school and I turned out okay. There’s no reason why kids today […]
I love watching visions of the future from technology companies. Not only are they usually thinking ahead of most of us, they also are trying to actually create the future […]
Eric Marcos says: Let them touch the computer. That’s how the world changed for me, for all of us. If you give kids a little bit of trust and let […]
The Did You Know? (Shift Happens) videos have been seen by at least 40 million people online and perhaps that many again during face-to-face conferences, workshops, etc. This week saw […]
Who says you can’t have a good conversation on Twitter? View “Iowa school flexibility” on Storify Image credit:toe touch
Today Seth Godin blogged: When the truth is just around the corner … what’s your posture? … When your organization has a chance to see itself as its customers do, […]
Dan Mourlam said in his recent post that he didn’t think 1:1 laptop initiatives were the starting point for transforming education. Instead, educators should begin with a critical examination of […]
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills and Fablevision have just released a short animated film, Above and Beyond, that emphasizes the value of the 4 Cs: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, […]
I’ve spent the last two days at the Iowa Education Summit. Now that it’s over, I have a multitude of thoughts and observations swirling around in my head. Here are eight… […]
Since the past four have been so successful [last year we had 114 posts!], I am putting out a call for people to participate in Leadership Day 2011. To paraphrase what I […]
I served on a panel, Education in a Digital World, at the Iowa Education Summit today. Here is what I said during my 5 minutes of opening remarks. Good afternoon, We have to […]
Riley Lark asks, ‘What’s at the heart of your classroom?‘ At the heart of mine are the concepts of student agency and continuous reflection, revision, and renewal. I teach graduate students: […]
Three videos worth watching… In Fall 2008, only 6 school districts in Iowa had a 1:1 student laptop initiative in place. In Fall 2011, as many as 90 to 100 districts […]
I had a conversation with Scott Meech at Edubloggercon this year in which we discussed the fine line between ‘naming the problem so we can solve it’ and ‘shaming and […]