Our email-based, position-specific e-Lists generate lively conversation year-round, but the Division Head e-List has been especially insightful lately. In addition to recommendations on specific curriculum, technology, and policy-related questions, there are many words of wisdom to be shared from listening in to the conversations of your fellow Division Heads.

Your school’s administrators—from the School Head, to the Admission Director, to the Business Manager—are all ambassadors of your school’s mission. They are the physical “faces” to your community that embody your school’s values. Their ambassadorship means they all have vital roles to play in promoting and representing your annual fund and capital campaigns to current and potential donors.

If you’re not already subscribed to ISM’s e-Lists, then you’ve missed some great conversation from fellow Development Directors. To get you started, we’ve collected several great insights from your peers around the country and the world as they crowdsource common knowledge to every Director’s problem.

Sometimes people removed from a sticky situation can see solutions to the problem better than the person mired in it. Our Admission Director e-List has been lively lately with such solutions, and we thought we'd share their insights with you, dear readers!

Social media can be a powerful tool. It’s the online driver of word-of-mouth recommendations that keep your admission pool full. However, the platforms are only useful if your school uses its accounts strategically. Having an account for the sake of having one—without knowing who your audience is or what you want them to do—will waste time and resources when you have none to spare.

As telecommuting becomes more acceptable in many professional industries, several public schools that want its graduates to be prepared for the workforce have begun to experiment with “work from home” days for its students, as reported by Benjamin Herold for Education Week. Don’t mistake this phenomenon for an online school or homeschooling program. These are brick-and-mortar schools offering unique interactive activities for students to complete in home offices or at dining room tables, creating a purposeful blended learning environment that administrators hope may replicate “real world” working conditions after graduation.

Mark Engstrom is a Certified Blending Designer, Middle & Upper School Head at Allen Academy—and an ISM workshop leader. This February, he was invited to lead his fellow consultants in a day-long professional learning opportunity surrounding one of the latest educational trends emerging from the Information Age: blended learning. This curriculum focuses on the integration of personal learning through technology with more traditional face-to-face interactions between teachers and students. The Source had a chance to speak with him after his presentation and dig deeper into what he sees the impact of technology-fueled education will be on private schools now, as well as what it could be in the future.

When blended learning, gamification, makerspaces, and other technology-heavy buzzwords make their way through educational journals and forums, it can be hard to see whether these tools and techniques are something to invest in. Are many of the digital learning trends just fun ideas for those bored with tried-and-true techniques, or do they truly mark a fundamental shift in how students need to learn? Here, we break down four studies that offer a deeper context to show how technology-assisted tools have previously helped—or hindered!—learning in other schools.

Social media can be a quick, easy way to distribute news that impacts your school’s families, adding a resource to your school’s communication tools. However, in the event of a crisis, social media can work against your school’s efforts to secure your campus and reduce panic.

Risk management is more than simply having any property and casualty insurance. Protecting your school and its students starts with your general knowledge of what’s protected and what’s vulnerable for when—not if—loss occurs when considering policies. However, insurance policies are not easy reading for the less experienced. To help you manage your school’s risks, here are some points you should review in your school’s policies.