Today, I visited the 5th grade classrooms at East Elementary School.  These classes have taken EeePC laptops and have officially blown the doors of learning old-school.  Scott Murphy (our Superintendent) and I watched as students accessed online videos and tutorials on the circulatory system, then marveled as they wrote in their cognitive framework (not sure if I'm using the right term here... one of the 5th graders tried to explain this to me [;-).  They use wikis and blogs for their writing.  Blogs are their publishing medium like a news service.  Wikis are their online document workspace.  And the wealth of the Internet and subscribed databases are their information source.  And did I mention that these classrooms have students with disabilities and students who don't speak English as their first language... no matter!  The traditional labels don't mean much anymore.  These are students... scholars... writers... intellectuals... the NEW 5th graders.

Here are some pictures I took today (I won't show kids...

First, I have to again note that I have not been a prolific blogger this year.  I think this is because we are dealing with some really unpleasant issues at the ESC and they have taken lots of my thinking time... and such matters don't lend themselves well to blogging.  On to my thoughts for this post...

Last summer, I posted a blog item about a wireless challenge I observed at another venue outside LPS.  The experience made me really appreciate Mike Zehner and his network team for the high quality wifi services we enjoy and utilize in the district.  My post was intended to send some kudos his way and to use the experience to highlight how challenging wireless really is.  However, my message was not as well crafted as I hoped and I got a comment back from a member of the organization hosting the event noting that I seemed happy to comment on other people's failures and not explore our own.  Since it was not my intent to bash anyone, I took the post down.

At this time, I will indeed report on my own...

Recently, I stopped by Randy Stall's desk when he shared some survey results of an online course he helped deliver on web 2.0 in the classroom...