School Leaders Need to Become Data Misers: Make Ed Tech Vendors Justify Every Single Bit of Data They Say They Need

 It is time for schools and school districts to get miserly with their students’ and staffs’ data. 

Don’t share it, ever, with Ed Tech companies and vendors.

If they ask for data, make them justify every single data-point requested and then evaluate their justification. 

If you deem their need for the data as unnecessary, tell them they can’t have it and need to work around it. Period.

If they say their product will not work without that data, tell them to redesign it so that they won’t need it.

School leaders need to be the ones in control of their students’ and staffs’ data, period.

Become a data miser when you work with any companies. 

Top 5 Blog Posts of the Week on The 21st Century Principal

What is everyone reading this week? Here’s the most often visited blog posts on the 21st Century Principal this week.

1. “Evernote Journal App for the iPad: Excellent Way to Take Meeting Notes and Keep Logs” Review of a free app for your iPad that allows you to take journal-like notes and sync them to your Evernote account.

2. “Establishing a Culture of Creativity by Paying Attention to Failure” We spend a great of time paying attention to success and winning. Perhaps we need to spend some time in our schools looking at the language we use to talk about failure if we truly want schools with creative cultures.

3. “Why Wouldn’t We Let Students Blog? Reasons to Get Students Blogging” Why would we keep students from blogging? It is the English teacher’s dream. Blogs are the avenue to authentic audiences and authentic writing.

4. “Data-Driven Decision Making Usually Means ‘Test-Score Driven Decision Making” When policymakers use the term “Date-Driven Decision Making,” let’s face it. They mean “Test-Score Driven Decision Making. But if we use just test scores to guide what we do in schools, we ignore much of the most important data.

5. “5 Free Summer Professional Development Resources from ASCD” Complements of ASCD, here’s some great summer professional development resources you can access online. Best of all? They’re free!

Thanks everyone for reading!