When you hire someone you hire their network!

As schools prepare their budgets for the new fiscal year, the time comes when either new positions or vacancies must be filled. In most instances, the hiring process can be quite labor intensive.  Assistant heads, division heads, teachers, and students are often involved in the process but in an effort to reduce load, I simply propose that your school consider this, when you hire someone you hire their network.  While the concept of networking is not a novel one, I would emphasize that my definition of network is better suited to the personal learning network.  If your school is serious about developing 21st century skills, developing relationships with other schools, and making better global citizens, then it is essential that those doing the hiring recognize the importance of the network potential employees can bring to their school.

After reviewing resumes, like many organizations, I head to the web to see what kind of digital footprint the potential candidate has. Essentially, does the candidate Google Well.  If things go well for the candidates, they are present in some of the following digital arenas: 

• they have a blog or they post comments regularly
• preferably about their educational philosophy or activities that convey that philosophy
• they have an active twitter account with useful tweets
• they actively participate in educational nings
• they have their own website
• an ePortfolio of activities
• their Facebook page does not contain questionable material

Will one miss a jewel in the rough? Possibly, but one can certainly glean a great deal more from a candidate who participates regularly online.  While this method works when looking for instructional technologists, tech directors, and tech coordinators, it is time for schools to be more selective and expect candidates to Google Well because it is no longer good enough to simply know the material.

Infographic: How Employers Use Social Media to Hire and Fire

from the Atlantic Monthly

Blogging about Tweets: Open-Source Texts

I continue to be amazed by the conversations that I have on twitter.  I talk it up regularly but I can't seem to get the majority of my teachers or administrators to dive into this incredibly valuable application.  So instead, I use twitter to feed my faculty and staff with little pearls that are shared by peeps from around the world.  I must admit that when asked where did you find this information or resource, I'm proud to say that it came from my PLN on twitter.

All right I'll get off my soapbox and back to the gist of this post.

In early December, @fredbartels posted a tweet regarding online texts.  Below is a transcript of our conversation.

fredbartels: How do we get the Chemistry teachers together for a day to brainstorm replacements for textbooks?5:33am, Dec 03 from Twitter for iPhone

cuevash: @fredbartels How about organizing a series of unconference events to bring folks together? thoughts?5:48am, Dec 03 from Web

fredbartels: @cuevash Unconference events to bring folks together is a brilliant idea! Who do we get to organize and fund them?6:02am, Dec 03 from Web

cuevash: @fredbartels it may be possible for individual school's to sponsor a certain discipline and have an opportunity to connect w all on the web6:26am, Dec 03 from Echofon

fredbartels: @cuevash Seems like a viable approach. What would be the incentive for a subject area specialist to attend one of these?

At this point I fell off the conversation because family life took over.  A few days later we picked up right where we left off.

cuevash6:43am via HootSuite

@fredbartels Realized I nvr responded to ur last tweet re: unconference and incentive 4 subj area specialists.

cuevash6:44am via HootSuite

@fredbartels Hope to gather life long learners who would want to participate in a collaborative effort to develop a superior resource

cuevash: @fredbartels for students that is inexpensive and or free, accessible from the web, self managed and updated for accuracy and relevance.6:46am, Dec 11 from HootSuite

cuevash6:49am via HootSuite

@fredbartels it would be great if discipline leaders would emerge to facilitate the process and perhaps dev a standardized format.

@fredbartels @cuevash Brilliant! A compellling rationale for helping with open source 'texts'. Love how Twitter can help distill ideas down to essences.

So where does this leave us?  Well the conversation is certainly far from over but perhaps with sufficient interest, we can overcome inertia and get something started.

Are you interested? Know someone who might be interested?  Then join the conversation but at minimum let others know.

Thanks Fred for the inspiration!

Celebrating Our Faculty's Accomplishments

 A few months ago, our tech department launched a new technology blog-St. Christopher's Tech Central Got Tech?! Now a blog itself is not a new concept but rather than having posts written by the techies, we've been soliciting teachers to share their successes. In addition to those posts, we post information about training opportunities, tech tips, and controversial articles.

As a result, we have teachers from our lower, middle, and upper schools sharing and commenting on the blog posts.  The asynchronous discussions are taking place and our teachers have been expressing their opinions and applauding their colleagues' efforts.  But perhaps the best part about the blog is that it is written by the faculty and causing what I like to call positive peer pressure.

So if you have a few moments, please stop by and write a comment and show our faculty that they have an audience considerably larger than our school community.