Week One - Communication and Technology

  An interesting type of communication occurred on Tuesday of my first week.  This was the day of the Town Hall Meeting where employees had a chance to listen to summaries from the leaders of the company describing recent success and current situations.  It was also an opportunity for questions and concerns of the employees to be addressed.  It was really impressive seeing the large number of Principal employees gathered in the plaza.  On the surface, this appeared to be a fairly low-tech event, but as I reflect on it and try to image the differences in this meeting today compared to ten years ago, I think a lot has changed.  One of the parts that may not have been present ten years ago was that there were cameras filming the event and the feed was being streamed over the Internet to locations in Des Moines and around the world to Principal locations abroad.  I had a chance to take a look at the technology in an auditorium where the meeting was being displayed and I can see quite a few opportunities for students of mine who have interests in audio/visual technology.  Even smart phones showed up in the meeting as the host of the meeting used her phone to collect emailed questions on the go that could have been from any of the locations watching.

  In addition to the Town Hall Meeting, I've had a chance to observe the use of digital technology in almost every operation at The Principal.  Some of the examples I've seen have been for delivering training in an interesting, accessible and immediate format, communicating between global partners in the form of teleconferencing, and interacting between local colleagues in the form of email, instant messaging, and calenders.  In addition to these, I've seen many examples of information sharing through different software that aids in collaboration or helps to gather data.  There is also software that is used to analyze the information and send it to the people who need it.  This reinforces what I was able to observe in my extern experience last year, in that I need to find more ways to make communication through technology a part of what we do in the classroom.