SLA had its first "virtual staff meeting" tonight. We’ve been planning on moodle for the past few weeks, but tonight we all met in a moodle chat room and discussed the topic — "Defining the 9th Grade Essential Questions."

Remember, these are a group of people who are going to have to come together and work as a team to start a school, but who, to this point, haven’t really met each other. So it would be understandable if our first chat session was a bit awkward — especially when we kept having server load issues and people kept getting kicked off.

That would have been understandable, but that really wasn’t my impression — and hopefully, it wasn’t the impression of any of the SLA faculty. The conversation was lively and very productive. We ended it with a draft of our three essential questions. (I’ll post them in a few days when the faculty have had a chance to step back from the night and comment…) I think it was more productive as many faculty meetings at schools all over the country.

I think we’ll keep evolving our online voices with each other, and I know we’ll solve the server load problems, so I expect that we’ll continue to get better at using Moodle as a planning tool, but even with all of that, I keep thinking that we’re able to collaborate so much more this spring than we otherwise would, were it not for the online tools we’re using.

And I can’t help but wonder what other uses ICT technology could have. I have a high school principals’ meeting on Thursday. The school is about a half an hour from my office, and it’s probably over an hour from the schools on the other side of the city. Why not have a "virtual meeting?" What is the point of putting all 48 principals in a room for a half a day away from their schools anymore? Principals get pulled out for monthly regional meetings, monthly city-wide meetings and monthly high school meetings. April only had 15 days of school, that means that school leaders would be out of the building 20% of the days. (Full disclosure, the city-wide meeting was cancelled.) How can we keep justifying this educationally?

And of course, this is not a problem unique to Philadelphia, but we do have the chance to change. Laptops, web cams and conference software, and we’d be in business. I’m not saying that face-to-face meetings have no place. Clearly, there is still a huge value to face-to-face meetings, but how much more efficiently could we run our schools if our principals weren’t being asked to leave the building for meetings three times a month? What if it was only once a month? What if the other meetings were in a video conference? What if we had a city-wide high school principals’ Moodle site where we could discuss many of the issues that only get 30 minutes of time at a monthly meeting?

How much would most principals prefer spending two hours in a virtual meeting while still in their own building if needed? How many more voices of school leaders could we hear if held our professional development online so that more people could write, participate and reflect on the issues, rather than only having a short piece of a monthly meeting devoted to the topic?

The beautiful thing is that Philadelphia is in front of the curve in the potential to do this. Unlike many urban districts, SDP already allows for online courses to count as professional development hours. There are folks from the district who are sitting in on our course to study how we plan together online. I have a meeting with folks from the Educational Techology Group tomorrow to talk about online learning for our students. We can make the leap for our teachers and administrators too. People see the power of this kind of learning. And there are many people within the School District of Philadelphia leadership who want to see us get there. So I am hopeful that in the next few years, we will. And maybe, this is a way SLA can lead the way.

And hey, at least you don’t have to wear a tie to a virtual staff meeting.