Looking at strategy as an element of vision planning…

It is now time to start looking at developing a 3 year vision or plan for both the school library I work in and my next university assignments. Perhaps I can blend them together eventually and save a lot of time and stress in the long run.

I am reading Davies & Davies The Strategic Dimensions of Leadership and on the first page it makes this interesting point:

Strategy… encompasses direction setting, broad aggregated agendas, a perspective to view the future and a template against which to evaluate current activities. (p.7)

This reading has resonannce with me as to plan for the future of the Library, I need to evaluate what the library offers now and look at what the library can offer going into the future. Do we need an e-platform? Do we need to increase the numbers of books students can borrow? The question I need answering is:

What does the school community need from the Information Resource Centre?

Davies & Davies (2005, p.9) describe that is critical that a leader creates a strategy with others and not dictate it. In the case of a school library team- it would allow discussion, debate, the suggestion of innovative ideas based on the ideas of others. Most importantly it would give the ‘team’ ownership of the vision and hopefully a willingness to fully commit to the implementation.

Davies & Davies cite Burgleman and Grove (1996) to describe that organisations reach key moments for strategic change ‘when it is possible to develop new visions, create new strategies and move in new directions.” (p.11) For the library I work in, I think that time has come as the school moves into its evaluation phase in preparation for the new 3 year plan.

 References

Davies, B. J., & Davies, B. (2005). The dimensions of leadership : the strategic dimensions of leadership. In School leadership in the 21st century : developing a strategic approach (2nd ed.) (pp. 7-16). London : RoutledgeFalmer.

Using Voicethread and finishing the group assignment!

After a marathon effort all day yesterday between me and my wordsmith we have got the ‘group’ powerpoint presentation to a point where we could hand it in tomorrow! (1 week early) We still have a group Skype meeting this afternoon.

Once 2/3rds of the assignment was written, we noticed that our exploding walls design no longer fitted the theme of the assignment. Since the implementation part of the assignment was about iPads, I was inspired to change the design to an iPad and for that extra special touch, I researched which font was the font used by Apple for all its marketing- the result- Myriad Pro in semi bold! I have Myriad pro on my computer so it is the font of the assignment!

Finishing early has allowed me to practice my presentation for Tuesday afternoon on using Voicethread to comment on documents, pictures files etc for the helping hands meeting. I have used the Powerpoint presentation as an example so A) I can show my design off, and B) show people who have heard about this group powerpoint while I have been struggling with it. Voicethread is easy-ish to use if you watch the youtube video from Radford University. I have sent invites to all the audience members for tuesday so that they can practice collaborating on a voicethread. The only part that I found difficult was solving why my microphone was not recording into voicethread.

To solve the problem I used the troubleshooting guide but you need an understanding of the control panel of your computer in order to solve the problem. As someone who uses technology a lot- even I was challenged to use this software. Let’s see what happens on tuesday…


I will upload the voicethread later (after we submit our assignment)

 

Miss H 

 

Reflecting on the group assignment so far…

I am trying to be optimistc and positive about this group assignment as being negative doesn’t achieve anything except increase stress.

What is working (at the moment)…

1. The design of the PowerPoint is fantastic- I am very proud of it.

2. The two missing group members are back online and trying to contribute.

What needs to be worked on to make it better:

1. We need a logical structure to focus our writing.

2. We need to assign Jobs to everyone so that the work is broken up once we have a structure. (We should have done this at the very beginning.)

3. We need clearer guidelines from the lecturer about what our PowerPoint should look like ie structure, word count etc.

In my reading and research I did come across Lencioni’s 5 dysfunctions of a team. Our group is experiencing every one of the dysfunctions.

Here is a summary

 
I have just been reading an interesting article on conflict resolution which might come in handy : Mackay, H. (1998). Resolving conflict through listening. In The good listener: better relationships through better communication (pp.189-199). Sydney : Pan Macmillan.

It is 5 days to the next Skype conference. Here’s hoping that we can get it all together….

I still want this assignment to be over….

 

Miss H.

When 4 becomes 2…

This is the original image for the presentation's background

The last few days have been very frustrating. Since our Skype meeting 2 of the members of my group have stopped contributing anything to the group wiki. One has been sick but she promised to upload her contribution before the end of the weekend and the other is not responding via emails at all. I will have to try and ring him from work tomorrow. If there have been problems then, in my opinion the considerate thing to do is ring or email and say I have a sick child, so that the rest of the group is aware that the person will be offline for a few days.

Now all the work has been left to the 2 of us. Fortunately I have been teamed with someone who is very gifted at reading copious amounts of information, making sense of it and is very generous in sharing his analysis with me. I have been trying to contribute my readings as well as designing a fabulous powerpoint template for the assignment. If I do say so myself- it is the best one I have ever created. I bought a photo of an exploding brick wall and manipulated it in Photoshop. Between the 2 of us remaining members of the group, we have chosen the colours of red, white and black as the key colours of the presentation.

At this point- I don’t care about our missing group members. I am working to get the best possible mark for my pair and I. My pair and I have decided that when we get to the next Skype meeting and the other 2 show up- they can’t make changes unless they contribute this week.

To make matters worse- the lecture has failed to provide standards referenced frameworks for this assignment. In class, all teachers are expected to demonstrate examples of each marking band ie what does an A look like? If this was an assignment in high school- it would be challenged by the assessment committees for the contradictory instructions and lack of standards referenced frameworks.

I so want this assignment to be over… NOW!

 

 

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