Using Collections: An Administrators Use Case Scenario

How I Use Collections as A Central Office Administrator

As the Director of Educational Reform, Compliance and IT in my district I get to interact with parents, administrators, educators, support personnel and students in many different fora. On a weekly basis, I am often interacting with educators as we build curricula together. Almost as often I find myself, working with both educators, parents and legal representation on policy matters. As we became more and more comfortable using Collections for curricula purposes I've noticed a million and one ways I could use Collections as an administrator. It's almost become a joke in my district because I don't think a day goes by without me uttering, "Ya know, you can use Collections for that."

Since August I've...

As the summer months began to wind down the opportunities for collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders increased dramatically. I found myself using Collections to do the following:

• Respond to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act Request
• Work with Elementary School Principals and Teachers to Build a new district master schedule
• Revamp our Reading Intervention Model to an In-class Guided Reading Model
• Plan a Shared 2018 ISTE Conference Submission

Each one of these tasks provided me an opportunity to use Collections in a way I hadn't even imagined during the early stages of implementation. Whenever I was faced with a task to collaborate with an individual or a group I immediately recognized that Collections would serve a valuable purpose. Whenever I was faced with a task to share information with a selected group, or something needed to be public I kept coming around to the same popular refrain... "Collections would serve a valuable purpose." Each scenario below is a concrete example of how flexible and valuable Collections has become in my administrative toolkit.

Response to an ACLU FOIA Request

It's not uncommon for our district to receive a Freedom of Information Act from individuals or even groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Often these requests require us to print or copy a lot of information. This usually adds considerable cost to the district in terms of printing resources and human resources to accomplish the request. Using an ACLU/FOIA Collection to meet our lawful obligation allowed us to efficiently and less expensively honor the request.

The image above depicts a request our district recently received from the ACLU concerning a new Rhode Island state law. I took all of the relevant information and added it to a Collection. This allowed us to provide the ACLU with an up-to-date record to meet their request. What was even more important is that they could review all of the data housed on our website as it changed over time. Not only were we able to meet the intent of the FOIA request, but we were also able to demonstrate a level of transparency and cooperation that isn't easily conveyed using traditional methods of responding to such requests.

Building a New Master Schedule & Revamping Our Reading Intervention Model

Our district has recently implemented a new master schedule and guided reading model across our three elementary schools. It has been a process that has been fraught with many unintended consequences. Communication to a wide range of constituents has been vital to ensure our students and teachers can be successful during their school day. As you could guess, communication is being generated from a wide range of educators. Using a Collection to gather all of the resources is essential in trying to keep everyone appraised of changes.

The image above illustrates the wide range of resources that we're sharing with our learning community as we muddle through a new initiative. In our district, it's essential that communication is open, transparent and available to all of our stakeholders. Using an Elementary Master Schedule and Reading Intervention Collection easily fits into this model. Educators across the district only have to visit one place to find all of the resources that are being used and created by others within the district.

Planning a Shared Session to ISTE 2018

Over the last, six months or so, Jason See, Follett's Director of Classroom Solutions, and I have done a lot of work together concerning Collections and a prototype Collections add-on for lesson development. The work has been mutually beneficial, and we felt like it made a lot of sense to put in a presentation together for ISTE 2018. As you could imagine our conflicting schedules left little time for synchronous meetings. We used Google Docs and Collections to collaborate on the work for the presentation. In fact, we actually used Collections to submit our presentation to the ISTE Submission Committee. The image below shows the ISTE 2018 Collection Jason and I used to organize our presentation.

Jason and I will be able to use the Collection that we created for the presentation team with our participants during our actual presentation. Not only does it make sense to use Collections for conference presentations, but it makes sense to use Collections for locally created PD sessions. Members of our professional development team have begun to use Collections to organize and curate materials that we use with our participants during PD activities.

It's easy to understand how "Ya know, we could use Collections for that." easily rolls off of my tongue multiple times a day. I'm amazed by the flexibility of a tool that initially appeared to be about resource curation. Fortunately, we realized it was actually an additional tool to support our district's collaboration suite. I look forward to discovering other ways our administrators, teachers, and students will use Collection over the rest of the school year. The options seem to be limitless.