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17th May 2006

Texas Educators: Join Texas Leads!

posted in blogs, leadership |

Calling all innovative and forward-thinking educational leaders in Texas! Calling other Texas teachers who may not presently consider themselves “technologically cutting-edge,” but want to learn more about how technology is and can be effectively utilized as a tool for engagement and learning in the 21st century classroom! A new educational listserv (and blog) has been created called “Texas Leads!: K-16 Educational Technology Advocates.” Subscribe and receive email posts from other subscribers (and post yourself) either in daily “digest” versions or as they are posted throughout the day.

The TexasLeads wikispaces site provides information about the group and subscription info via Yahoo groups. Send a blank email to texasleads-subscribe at yahoogroups dot com to join the listserv.

The visionary educational leader, Miguel Guhlin, has started this group, similar but with a state-level focus to Andy Carvin’s wwwedu Yahoo group and listserv. Even though blogs, RSS feeds, and many of the other educational technology advances of recent months are great– email is still the basic communication “common denominator” for many teachers. So spread the word among all the Texans you know! Subscribe to Texas Leads!

Miguel created this group with the following vision in mind:

“Over time,” shares Robert Quinn in Change the World, “interactions tend to become patterned or normalized. We develop individual scripts and collective cultures. Scripts structure the individual, whereas cultural structure the collective. These…resemble the shell of the seed. If they crack, we can begin to interact with our environment in new ways, and these interactions can give rise to a new self or a new collective.

It is with this quote in mind that I began the Texas Leads! email group. Other groups are forming that appear to have different needs, that are looking beyond old scripts and cultures. It is time for the shell of the seed to be cracked, and give birth to a new creation. Although the group is only for Texas education technology advocates, I wanted to share its creation with you.

We’re not just in the educational arena to prepare students for mandated tests. We’re here to prepare them for life, and we go to work each day confident in the knowledge that the things we say, the people we interact with, and the things we write truly do change the world– one conversation at a time.

A key challenge for all of us who share this vision of education and our roles as teacher-leaders is to extend the conversations we have to include more people. The Texas Leads! email listserv will advance this goal by bringing more educators into the sorts of conversations we all need to be having about teaching, learning, technology, and the challenges as well as opportunities of working in 21st century schools.

On this day..

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 17th, 2006 at 10:46 pm and is filed under blogs, leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There is currently one response to “Texas Educators: Join Texas Leads!”

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  1. 1 On May 18th, 2006, Patsy Lanclos said:

    This is a great idea! I have joined and hope many other Texas educators will also. Together we can be a powerful voice as well as generate powerful contributions to the field of instructional technology.