4 stories marked the beginning of my presentation to principals and leaders in Central/East Texas this past week. The stories were those of Tom Taylor (young gamer) who dropped out of high school and made $250K in his first 6 months showing people how to play video games, Moses my relative who dropped out of college and has his own business going with post-doctoral grads reporting to him, my daughter and her experience with Alone in the Middle, and the Codex authors. Do you know of any others?

School can often irrelevant to what are children are able to do OUT of school.

At the request of the Meadows Principal Improvement Program, I delivered a keynote for principals and leaders participating in the Meadows Principals Improvement Program (MPIP2008). I created/organized resources, as well as stole quite a few, and made it all available online at http://snipurl.com/learn . One of the fun aspects was recording podcasts prior to the conference start and posting them online, then playing them during the break at http://mpip2008.blogspot.com.

Some of the nice things folks said are included below:

• I was energized by today’s keynote. I am working on creating a blog to allow my teachers to communicate about school improvement. I also want to investigate creating a blog to engage parents. I plan to create a document on google docs this weekend that I need to collaborate with other principals in my district. Also plan to look at Wikis, and much more.

  Once of the best conferences I have attended in a while.
  Source: Kim Scoggins

• I agree. I really enjoyed the session as well. I will be doing some staff development sessions on the different ideas that were presented. I am not a whiz on the computer but really want to do some of the POD casting stuff!
  Source: Tina Harris
• Thank you for a great presentation today. We started out this school year committed to integrating technology more creatively and meaningfully into our instruction. Today’s session was a great boost for me to bring some things back to my faculty that they may not have tried yet.
  Source: Jennifer Porter, Principal

Below is my presentation:

In a lot of ways, it’s an expanded version of this presentation:

combined with this one:

One of the neat experiences involved running into a fellow Panamanian working in Garland ISD, Garland, Tx. What a treat!