Operational playbooks for K-12 district technology teams: procurement, coaching, and infrastructure protocols a technology director can hand off on Monday morning.
Start with the dashed circle. On the I Had Potential shirt, the words I HAD POTENTIAL sit in white capitals above a white curved ramp that descends from upper left to lower right. At the top of the ramp, on the upper-left ledge, is an empty circle drawn with a dashed outline. At the bottom, […]
The first thing I notice on the Quirky Cotton Collective shirt is not the words. It is the triangle. A yellow caution triangle, the kind that usually means wet floor or high voltage, sits above or beside the lettering, and inside or next to it is a hand with a slash through it. The words […]
The garment preview shows one word: meh. Lowercase, bold, white, set large on a dark shirt. No animal, no diagram, no second line of smaller text explaining the joke. The period is doing as much work as the letters. Without it, the shirt reads as a sound. With it, the shirt reads as a verdict […]
The garment image shows a rectangle of black-and-white speckle, the marbled pattern that has covered American school notebooks for decades. Down the left edge runs a dark binding strip. Inside the rectangle, a white ruled label is headed with the word COMPOSITION in block capitals. Inside that label, where a student would normally write their […]
The shirt reads I WEAR THIS SHIRT PERIODICALLY, and beneath the sentence sit four periodic-table-style tiles: 53 I, 74 W, 22 Ti, 16 S. The tile symbols are I, W, Ti, S. They do not spell the sentence. They do not spell periodically either. They spell nothing at all, in the ordinary sense of spelling. […]
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner, so treat this as an owner-authorized column rather than an independent review. The design is doing something specific, and it is worth naming before we get to whether it works. Above the words GOT TOO SILLY sits a white goose-like bird. The bird wears […]
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. Look at the garment preview for the Meh Funny Sarcastic Introvert Minimalist Saying and you will see almost nothing. On a dark shirt, centered, in lowercase, the word meh. appears at a scale that would be illegible from across a faculty meeting table. No […]
When a district adopts a new curriculum and rolls out a technology change in the same semester, teachers do not experience two initiatives. They experience one long, exhausting learning curve with two sets of binders. The reading block now has a new scope and sequence, new assessments, and a new online component. The device cart […]
Your district has five people in technology. The superintendent has one hour on the calendar between a facilities update and a parent advisory meeting. That is the entire budget for the most important security conversation you will have this year. Do not spend it explaining what ransomware is. Spend it forcing the cabinet to make […]
An SIS migration is not an IT project. It is a school-calendar project that happens to involve servers. The difference matters, because the calendar does not move. If your cutover lands in the middle of progress-report week, you will spend the next six weeks explaining to the board why grades were late — and no […]
Network infrastructure planning in a K-12 district is not the same as enterprise IT planning. The difference is the school calendar. You have roughly 180 instructional days, a handful of in-service days, and a summer window that shrinks every year because of summer school, construction, and staff vacations. If your core switch fails on a […]
Second Monday in October. Your inbox has three messages before 7:45 a.m. The first: a seventh-grade ELA teacher who caught a conference session over the weekend and wants to pilot an AI writing assistant with her 120 students before winter break. The second: your assistant superintendent, forwarding a vendor pitch for “AI-powered writing improvement” with […]