But what about the top school leaders? Education Week’sChristina Samuels wrote a recent article about the need for re-vamped evaluations of the people who manage the teachers: school principals.
According to Samuels, school districts struggle to design and implement effective principal evaluation systems. Today, most principals have annual reviews with district-level administrators, but these meetings do not serve to adequately assess the principals as instructional leaders, she writes. Samuels notes that Delaware has made some progress to improve evaluation procedures by developing a system that measures principals’ abilities to analyze school data and use it to set goals, as well as coach teachers to improve their practice.Read More »
Ahead of Cisco’s upcoming Desktop Virtualization announcement, we are conducting a series of interviews with members of our desktop virtualization product teams so get their insights into desktop virtualization from industry, customer and Cisco perspectives. In this blog, we interview Jeff Platon, Senior Director of Strategy and Operations for the desktop virtualization engineering product teams at Cisco. Jeff describes Cisco’s desktop virtualization solution, Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI), and explains what prompted Cisco to build it.
These just keep getting better! Reminiscent of Jack Bauer and Chloe O’Brian’s heroics on 24, check out the new animated mini-movie from Cisco in the continuing “Ike” series:
For those who may be unaware of the series, Ike Theodore (IT) Willis is the (mostly) silent IT guy who thwarts theft, fraud, and other calamities in a not-so-smooth fashion. He’s essentially James Bond’s awkward younger cousin who got an engineering degree instead of joining the British Secret Service. He’s a bit of an everyman, and especially relatable for those of us with a love for technology. Read More »
In the good old days last century, global sponsorship was the preserve of a select number of companies. Only a handful of sponsorship properties could be considered to have global reach (The Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup, Formula One Racing). A similarly small number of brands were big enough to pay the premium for gaining mass market brand exposure at a fraction of the cost of a global advertising campaign.
But technology has changed all that. Exponential growth in computing power, the internet and mobile has created a new environment. Brands are now able to reach customers with individual conversations pretty much anywhere in the world.
So why is it that brands continue to invest sometimes seemingly ridiculous sums in sponsorship platforms? The Rugby World Cup is currently enjoying the patronage of Mastercard, Heineken and DHL, amongst others, even though it is being hosted in a time zone that makes for late nights or early starts for the majority of rugby playing nations.
Next summer sees the ultimate sponsorfest in London with the Olympic and Paralympic Games coming to town. The London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) recently announced it had achieved revenues of over £700m ( that’s over 1 billion US Dollars) from its domestic sponsor programme. At a quoted £40-80 million for a Tier 1 sponsor, and something in the region of £15-25m for a Tier 2, which must then be at least doubled cover sponsorship activation, what is motivating brands to make these sorts of investments when more direct, cheaper conversations are possible?
Centuries ago, medieval mapmakers used to draw dragons and other mythological creatures on maps to indicate areas that were uncharted, and therefore potentially dangerous. One particular map, the Hunt-Lenox Globe, contains the phrase: “HC SVNT DRACONES,” Latin for “here are dragons.”
When examining social media and the potential effect it can have on one’s professional and personal landscape, I sometimes feel that all social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. should, somewhere near the copyright, contain the phrase “here be dragons.”
The amateur Art Historian in me would also like to see a beautiful image like the one above accompany the warning, too, but that’s less important.
Potentially Dangerous
For all its wonders, Social Media can be a dangerous thing. Read More »
We read a lot in education news about evaluating teacher performance, and I wrote a few months back about how telepresence could help with assessing and developing classroom leaders.
Read More »
