Mal Lee

•  Nov 2009 
  Outstanding Academic Title - for The Use of Instructional Technology in Schools - Awarded by the Col

Mal Lee is an educational consultant and author specializing in the development of digital schools and networked school communities.

Mal is a former director of schools, secondary college principal, technology company director and a member of the Mayer Committee that identified the Key Competencies for Australia’s schools. A Fellow of the Australian Council for Educational Administration (FACEA) Mal has been closely associated with the use of digital technology in schooling, particularly by the school leadership for the last two decades.

A historian by training Mal has written extensively in the last two decades, particularly in the Practising Administrator, the Australian Educational Leaders and Access, Educational Technology Guide on school planning for the Information Age, Digital Schooling and the effective use of digital technology in schooling.

Mal has released three previous publications with ACER Press. In 2008 Mal and Professor Michael Gaffney edited and had published Leading a Digital School. In 2009 he co-authored with Dr Arthur Winzenried The Use of Instructional Technology in Schools – Lessons to be Learned, and with Chris Betcher, The Interactive Whiteboard Revolution – Teaching with IWBs.

Copies of the books can be obtained from the ACER Press website at - http://shop.acer.edu.au/acer-shop/product/A4032BK

Mal is currently working with Associate Professor Glenn Finger (Griffith University) in the writing of his most significant work yet for ACER Press on Developing Networked School Communities – on the next phase of schooling.

Mal brings not only a business, research and school administrator’s perspective, but also an extensive understanding of the structural, organisational and technological challenges facing school and education leaders as they seek to take advantage of the immense and ever merging educational and administrative opportunities made available by digital technology, in a networked world.

Digital and Networked Schooling

A School Development Service

The desire is to support the development of good schools that wish to take advantage of the burgeoning digital and network technology to provide the best possible education for life and work in the C21.
Since the early 2000’s pathfinding schools across the developed world have finally demonstrated that it is possible to fundamentally change and enhance the established mode of schooling and to continually improve the nature and mode of schooling. In the C20 years of innovation had little or no real impact on the traditional mode of schooling but within the last decade there are schools that have significantly changed their operational mode and which have moved from a position of constancy to on-going evolution and development.
A growing number of schools across the world have moved from the traditional paper based operational mode to one that is primarily digitally based, where the everyday use of the digital is normalised by both the staff and the students.
In more recent years some of those digital schools have begun to use their digital and network technology to ‘dismantle the school walls’, to reach out and in particular to work more closely with the students’ homes and adopt a more networked mode of schooling.
In reaching out those schools have begun to appreciate schooling will need to adopt in time a significantly different operational mode if it is best capitalise upon the many opportunities made possible by the technology.
The goal of the consultancy is to assist schools realise the desired vision by drawing on the internationally pathfinding research on both digital schools and networked school communities the principals have undertaken.
The consultancy builds in particular upon the work done in writing Leading a Digital School (2008), The Use of Instructional Technology in Schools (2009) and Developing a Networked School Community (2010).
Approached astutely the opportunity exists for every school to move to the digital, and in turn the networked mode, to build on the great work they are currently doing and to take advantage of the technology to provide an ever more effective, efficient and attractive education.
However it is appreciated that busy school leaders, immersed in the everyday operation of their school don’t have the opportunity glean from the rapidly evolving international research the lessons to be borne in mind in taking the school forward.
This service provides that know how.