I’ve been CIO of my school district for more than eight years. That’s long enough for me to have gotten onto a lot of companies’ mailing lists and email lists (I counted one day in May, and about 40% of my email is EdTech-related SPAM, and that’s 40% of the stuff that got through the junk filters!). And somehow, though I’ve never signed up for any of them, I receive a whole bunch of unsolicited journals and magazines. T.H.E. Journal. EdTech News. eSchoolNews. Dozens of others. I get them all. Some of these magazines/journals are interesting; others not so much. The majority of them are just a bunch of ads interspersed with a few articles that were written by the PR firms of the companies that placed the ads. Not so great. Still, I skim through them to make sure there’s not something interesting in there.
One magazine in particular that I used to NEVER read is CIO (also online at www.cio.com). For a couple of years straight I took each issue I got and promptly tossed it into the trash. In fact, once a year I’d get my issue ofCIO with a page attached to the front of it that said, “WARNING: Your FREE subscription is about to expire. Act NOW or this will be your LAST issue.” And I would think to myself, “Stop teasing me!”
The reason I shunned the magazine is because CIO is focused on business CIO’s, not on education CIO’s, and I thought there was no use in reading the articles. But then one day a thought occurred to me: Maybe there were some tricks in the articles in there that I could APPLY to the educational setting. Sure, I might have to change some wording around, but if I did so, maybe I’d gain some insight from the articles. And since then, I’ve probably gotten as much out of the CIO magazine as I’ve gotten out of any of the others.
In the latest issue, for instance, is a brief article entitled “How can I increase my credibility and political power as a CIO?” On first blush, that doesn’t sound like it would apply to an educational CIO, and the tips in the article don’t always sound applicable, either, but with a couple of substitutions they absolutely are. Here are some of the tips, and how I’ve translated them for an Ed Tech setting:
- “Always Leave IT jargon in IT.” That one actually doesn’t need much translation at all. And it’s good advice. I have to constantly remind myself not to talk over people’s heads. Classroom teachers don’t want to hear anything about Active Directory or access points or firewalls. They want to know how to get the technology in their classrooms to work. And I need to explain it to them in a way they’ll understand.
- “Personally meet with stakeholders regularly to be sure you understand their priorities.” To make this suggestion applicable to schools, one simply has to define who an Ed Tech CIO’s “stakeholders” are. That would be district administrators, teachers, staff, students, and parents/community. As I read that suggestion, I realize that I do a good job of keeping administrators informed and personally meeting with them, a less effective job with the actual classroom teachers, and–frankly–a pretty bad job of keeping in contact with students and community. That’s something I need to rectify. Not sure how, but thanks to this article, I have found some areas for improvement!
- “Sometimes use time outside the office to develop deeper relationships with your stakeholders, supporters, and adversaries.” This is a suggestion that I’m a strong believer in (though I’d say that in education we don’t really have adversaries so much as in the cut throat business world). Invite a new principal to lunch to talk with him/her about technology in the classrooms. If a school invites you to attend an after hours party, go there, not because you like the people at the school (you might or might not), but to build relationships. If your regional technology organization has a designated time for eating before or after the meeting, get there early or stay late and eat. I typically learn more from such informal settings than I do from formal trainings anyway.
- “Never try to teach business leaders about technology…They don’t care, and it will annoy both of you. Focus on business needs, like attracting new customers or reducing operating costs.” In education, we’re not so interested in attracting customers or reducing operating costs (though we ought to be interested in both), but the biggest business need we have is the education of the individual student. When talking about technology initiatives in the district, I ALWAYS try to find a way to tie it back to student learning. If I can’t, I do try to tie it to reducing operating costs (such as our move from paper payroll stubs to virtual ones). And if I can’t tie it to one of those two, I probably don’t even try to get it done.
Four pretty good tips considering they’re from an article that is seemingly non-relevant to the job.