Professional Development

David K. Pennington, superintendent of the Ponca City Public Schools, Ponca City, Okla., has been elected the 2013-14 president-elect of AASA, The School Superintendents Association.

The conference—which will take place over two and a half days—will focus on the topic of teaching excellence and will have more than 150 sessions tailored for educators of all levels, including teachers, teacher leaders, principals, and district supervisors.

ASCD’s third annual Whole Child Virtual Conference, entitled “Moving from Implementation to Sustainability to Culture,” will run May 6–10, 2013.

September 20-23, 2013

Indianapolis, Indiana

During a panel at the 2013 SXSW Interactive conference, Austin educators discussed whether education should be used to help fill jobs in the technology industry. “I'm not sure it's education's job to fill jobs,” said Donald Christian, dean of the College of Business at Concordia University Texas. “[It's] being able to think, add to the community and [to] be a whole person, but that may or may not fill jobs.”

These new resources address a variety of topics important to educators today, including instructional leadership, formative assessment, and Common Core State Standards implementation.

Many school administrators classify teacher technology users into two categories: those who use technology and those who don’t. While this school of thought is logical, after having worked with and trained hundreds of teachers and administrators on integrating technology into instruction, I have found that there are generally three categories of technology teachers. I refer to them as, Digital Rock Stars, Digital Groupies, and Digital Phobes.