My district page is a required element of our web site.  This is the message I posted there today for the comming school year:

July 27, 2009

Welcome to the information technology pages for Littleton Public Schools.  2009-2010 promises to be an exciting year as we implement Inspired Writing in all our schools.  This project is a highly targeted effort to introduce more computing technology into our classrooms to improve student writing.  We know from work by Douglas Reeves and others, that writing impacts performance on all tests and Jason Ohler states that fluency is the ability to create in the medium you consume information.  As such, we realize that the pencil is not the tool of composition of the 21st Century and our students must develop the skills required to thrive and succeed in today’s society.  We can summarize those skills in four categories: Information, Communication, Productivity and Citizenship.

Information: Simply put, nobody goes to the book for information any more.  The book is about literature, information is a self-service activity, key-word searchable and instantly available to the connected citizen.  Our students must learn not just how to find information, but discern the useful from the rest.  Teachers should ask not just where a student found a piece of information, but why the student trusts it.

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We've been sharing with teachers the value of podcasting as a prewriting, revision, and publication tool for quite a while now, and many of our staff and students use tools like Audacity to capture their ideas in the writing process.  However, it can be complicated to attach the resulting .mp3 to a document or presentation and keep the resulting hyperlink intact. In other words, students might podcast a brainstorming session, link the file to a Word document, email the Word document home, and be surprised to have a dead link from the Word .doc back to the podcast file.