Learning On The Job

I’ve realized that in all of the chaos surrounding the start of the school year, I never got around to blogging about Inbox Zero!

Like many schools and institutions around the world, email has become an integral tool at UNIS. If the email server ever goes down for even 10 minutes (which, thanks to our tech department, very rarely happens!) there is a hint of panic amongst the staff.

Unfortunately, even as our reliance on email as a mode of communication has increased to the point of being absolutely essential, our ability to handle the vast quantities of email that we receive on a daily basis has barely evolved if at all. In fact, one of the most common complaints/concerns that I hear amongst our teachers is that there are too many emails sent.

When I first heard about Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero presentation that he gave at the Google Campus in 2006, I was instantly intrigued. It was billed as the best hour that one could spend and I agree! I have probably saved 10 times that or more since I instituted this system 1.5 years ago.

While I highly encourage everybody to check out Mann’s original presentation, the basics are below. I presented this to some interested staff to start the year and it was pretty well received!

If I needed one sentence to summarize Mann’s idea, it would be this: Stop living in your Inbox! Instead of being a slave to email and living in your inbox, convert your relevant messages into predefined actions (mine are delete, do right now, to do later , and reference, in that order) and keep your inbox empty. Don’t use your inbox as a filing cabinet (it should be for new messages that haven’t been processed yet) and don’t spend a lot of time filing messages into subfolders (almost everything goes into that generic reference folder; if I need to find it I will search for it later).

One of the themes for my presentation on the subject (which, I admit, unabashedly steals large portions from Mann, including a few slides which I didn’t have time to prepare myself!) is to think about the analog equivalents of digital tools. This is why you’ll see quite a few references to Mad Men.

Nobody in their right minds (certainly not Don Draper!) would keep all of their correspondence stacked up in their “In Tray” on their desk. Why do we feel we can do that with email? If a phone message were to cross your desk, most people would act on it immediately, either by calling the person back, making a note in their calendar or throwing it in the trash. Why do we treat email any different?

Ultimately, Inbox Zero is about converting messages into actions and then disposing of those messages. It has helped give me a sense of purpose on busy days when I would have normally been overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of messages in my inbox. Now I know exactly where I need to go in order to find things I need to get done!

How do you handle email at school? What systems work for you?

Image credits:
Inbox Zero Presentation by Merlin Mann licensed under CC BY NC ND
Cuffs6 by banspy licensed under CC BY

This year we are rolling out a new Responsible Use Agreement ¹ to all members of the school community. In my mind this has needed to be done for quite some time and it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster getting here, but I would like to thank Andrew Churches for his excellent resources licensed under Creative Commons.

To introduce th RUA to the teachers, I was given 1 hour last Friday. My goals were to familiarize all teachers with the new RUA and to empower them to feel comfortable discussing the idea of responsible use with students since they are truly the front line on this. I worked along with the counselors to come up with some “grey area” scenarios in Responsible Use. We then modified the Visible Thinking Routine Circle of Viewpoints to get groups of four to discuss the scenario from one of four viewpoints: student, teacher, administrator or parent. At the start of each of the four scenarios, participants took on a new role. The idea, in my mind, was to highlight the “grey” nature of these scenarios and, by looking at them from various perspectives, encourage discussion and the teaching of responsibility rather than judgement and assuming students know right from wrong.

The four scenarios we chose were:

• A legitimate search for images in class returns an inappropriate image. The student then shares that image with others.
• After completing their work, a student starts playing a flash-based game unrelated to school.
• While working independently, the student is constantly “multi-tasking.” As the teacher walks around, the student minimizes programs and hides the task bar.
• At break time, a group of students is playing online games together.

I was ² blown away by the amount of discussion this activity created, both during the activity and for the rest of the day. It has brought the idea of responsible use ³ to the forefront of our discussions about community.

The next step is to run a very similar session with all students in the Middle and High Schools as well as sessions for parents in the first couple of weeks of school. I want this to be on everybody’s minds as we begin this school year and it will tie in perfectly with our visit from Robin Treyvaud in October!

What scenarios would you choose to include that would generate discussion in your community? How do you share and discuss your RUA with parents and students?

Thanks again to all those in my PLN who gave me some great suggestions regarding classroom management in a 1:1 classroom. After posting my draft version, I made some minor revisions – most of them cosmetic, to be honest.

I gave this presentation today to about 16 teachers, mostly from the middle and high school and my highest turnout to date. I also had the principal for a good portion of the hour. I recorded the entire discussion and have now linked it to the presentation. There are some times when the discussion wanders a bit but it is all still (mostly) relevant to the topic at hand. If you’ve got 45 minutes or so, I invite you to take a look. Or you could browse through the pretty pictures…