The National Association of Secondary School Principals announced three extraordinary and tech-savvy school leaders have been selected as 2016 NASSP Digital Principals for integrating digital media in their efforts to improve instruction, student achievement, and their own leadership. The winners will be recognized at NASSP’s Conference Ignite ’16 in Orlando next month and will also be featured on the cover of a fall issue of Principal Leadership magazine.
Among this year’s winners is Glenn Robbins, NJPSA member and principal of Northfield Community Middle School in Northfield, NJ. Glenn set out first to renew the school’s broadband infrastructure and create a BYOD program, supplemented by Chromebooks. The school’s hallways have been converted to “Idea Streets,” an innovative learning initiative modeled on a similar program at Stanford University. The school’s Digital Shop thrives on design thinking and projects to better the lives of others, like designing 3D-printed prosthetic hands for children and creating video games from children’s books. Students also control their own learning pace on Northfield’s gamified learning management system that allows students to control their own pace and level of learning during the course and year. “Learning is a much more robust activity when students engage in real-world activities that serve a purpose,” Robbins says. “We firmly believe that by empowering students and staff to utilize technology each day, we are preparing them for their future, not ours.”
Also being honored are Bobby Dodd, principal of Gahanna Lincoln High School in Gahanna, Ohio and Winston Sakurai, upper school principal at Hanalani Schools in Mililani, Hawaii.