I imagine there is a post or several brewing from all of this, but here some quotes I pulled from our admin team’s notes (via Google Docs) today:
Some great quotes from our notes from the conference:
” what simple tools can make learning become remarkable -“
“you only need a handful of staff on board to move things forward”
“do teachers enjoy learning?”
“schools don’t encourage divergent thinking. Social networks – no deadlines, no stress, to a big crowd.”
“We need to teach kids to escape. Kids aren’t afraid to experiment with technology – they understand that they can’t “break” it.”
“To be successful in school, you have to be convergent. To be successful in the world you have to be DIVERGENT.”
“If we want our students to learn it deeply, they need to be able to teach it.”
“Unscripted – talk, write, have the students do critical thinking on the spot, showcasing the student, choosing the right vocabulary words, authentic assessment, gives the student an active role in their OWN learning.”
“what do we push to next?- creating the need for more people to embrace this and try the things that are out there and more importantly keep technology as the vehicle to get to the places we want students to go-technology should never replace best practices and good teaching”
“We should teach children to drill through content to find audience and purpose.”
“Filtering: we are not protecting our students in the way we think. We may actually be handicapping them.”
“Good idea for creating our own faculty search engines. We do this now but its done by teachers linking sites from their own websites.”
Chalkdust101 
I love to see these quotes. Even more, I love to know that these are administrators writing these things down. The idea of a faculty search engine is great. Again, we come back to the question, do teacher’s enjoy learning? Well, first, do they see themselves as learners? Would they want to be in their class?
One thing I would love to do is have a teacher be able to sit in on their own class. See what it would be like to be one of their students. Really see what it is like to learn through their own instruction.
Steve,
If nothing else this year, one of my goals is to get teachers into other teacher’s classrooms in an informal setting with no administrators present. It does so much for all parties involved. It shows the teacher who is teaching that he or she has support, it shows the observing teachers what practice looks like from an objective standpoint, and it shows the students that the teachers in the building care about getting better at what they do.
Our administrators were busy this week attending everything they could get their hands on, and overall I think we had a great week. We are meeting on Monday to break down our thoughts a little better, and I’ll know more about our direction then.