I think I have always been a connected educator even before “Al Gore invented the Internets.” I received journals in the mail, signed up for numerous workshops, attended any and all conferences I could get sent to, continually joined school committees, and I taught many in-service courses. With that type of exposure, I developed a fairly evident footprint in my school and district. People knew who I was, and what my educational philosophy was because I lived it. Of course looking back to my 20th-century career with a 21st-century eye, there are many things I did then that I would never do today.
The idea of an educator’s digital footprint is far more than just a reaching reputation. If one is to have any involvement online, that involvement better be positive and constructive, for it is there for eternity and for all to see. If one has amassed a number of good positives in one’s digital impression, it is not usually offset by the occasional misstep that we are all prone to have from time to time.…
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There seems to be an innate drive to success that burns within us. If not, there are hundreds of images and announcements that extol the value of advancement. Videos and the Internet lure with the delights of riches.
People around us seem to slide into success. It looks so easy for them.
But what do you do when you find yourself treading water? What is the mud sucking at your feet and keeping you mired in one place?
Check these four reasons and find solutions.
1. You’ve lost your passion. We need to know where our passions and strengths lie and then work to advance them. When we blindly follow the upward path because everyone is doing it, we fizzle.
When trying to identify your passion, the easiest place to begin is to ask yourself: “What interests me and what are interests? Interests are those things that grab your attention ever so gently without you even noticing.…
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This year’s Union of European Football Association (UEFA) Champions League final is set to be an all-German affair between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund on May 25 at London’s Wembley Stadium. Next to the World Cup, the UEFA Champions League final is one of soccer’s most-anticipated events. Recognizing the growing global appeal of the final, UEFA made the decision a few years ago to switch the game from a weeknight to a Saturday so it could attract more viewers from around the world.
Big Business for UEFA
These championships are big business in Europe. The annual estimated gross commercial revenue expected from the 2012/2013 UEFA Champions League and the UEFA Super Cup is €1.34 billion or about $1.73 billion, according to UEFA. This compares to annual revenues of $9.5 billion for the NFL, $7.5 billion for Major League Baseball, $4 billion for the NBA, $3.4 billion for the NHL, and $300 million for Major League Soccer.…
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In his keynote speech to NRA Show attendees Sunday, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz addressed the importance of balancing social responsibility and customer service with efforts to grow same-store sales.
Schultz first joined Starbucks in 1982, when the chain had only four stores. His dream was to create “the kind of company that our parents never got to work for,” he said. When the company went public in 1992 with 125 stores, it was the beginning of a long period of success for the coffee chain, during which “everything we touched turned to gold.” But speedy growth coupled with the nation’s unstable economy eventually led the company to put most of its efforts into growing same-store sales and stock prices. “The company began to measure and reward the wrong things,” Schultz said.
In 2008, Schultz gathered all of Starbucks’ store managers for a meeting in New Orleans, during which he laid out his plan to bring back the focus on strong customer service and community engagement on which the company had been founded.…
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I’ve been wrestling with what would work as an American collective narrative, what could unite us in investing and supporting public education the way we should. The Finnish people appear to agree collectively on a narrative of equity, for example.
Turning the mirror back on the United States, we’d like to believe that Americans could gather around this same call of equity. In reality though, Americans prefer a narrative of meritocracy. We tell rags-to-rich stories of folks, such as Bill Gates, for example. This so-called poor man who came from nothing and built an empire attended one of the most privileged boarding schools in the nation; the college he dropped out of was a small university — Harvard. Gates had access to a computer when few people even really knew what computers were. The reality of his narrative is really one of privilege, connections, and access.
So, what might be a narrative Americans could rally around? I’ve come to believe that perhaps personalization is the answer.…
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