|  | | | | | Author: | Maas Dan | Created: | 11/6/2006 |  | | Dan Maas is the Chief Information Officer for Littleton Public Schools. |
By Dan Maas on 8/26/2009Being an IT professional, many people ask me my opinions of the value of different technologies. But value is not an easy concept to nail down. Do you mean value in terms of cost or total cost of ownership? Do you mean how valuable a tool is to a proud new owner or the value a tool has to really well trained and experienced educator? Do you mean the value the tool has in various aspects of 21st Century skills and application to learning? Of course, the answer to these questions is "yes.... those are all the things I mean." [;-)
So over lunch the other day I wrote out a simple matrix and scored my values for various technologies in the district. Here is the result after I sorted my scores based on a point system I invented. I made the application and bang for the buck concepts double valued compared to the implementation concepts as I think that implementation is important but not as important as how a tool is used. I've simplified the concepts of 21st Century skills into the four ideas of information,... Read More » | By Dan Maas on 8/19/2009
Even on a 20th Century test, the effect seems positive.
The CSAP scores are in for the 2008-09 school year. As a function of our pilot effort entitled "Powering Up the Writer's Workshop," we are investigating test scores to look for any changes in achievement. The five schools that participated in the project (East, Field, Hopkins, Moody and Whitman) engaged in school-wide training on the Lucy Calkin's Writer's Workshop while the 5th grades had the additional support(and challenge) of using netbooks in the writing process. Students were to not only learn new 21st Century skills, but also to use netbooks and web 2.0 technologies to facilitate better writing skills.
Interviews with students and blog post responses suggest that students write more and are more interested in writing when they have netbooks in class. While it was not realistic to anticipate any measureable... Read More »
| By Dan Maas on 8/12/2009All the preparation work is winding down and schools are ramping up! Every 5th grade classroom is equipped with ASUS EeepC netbook laptop computers. Every section of 6th and 9th grade language arts are also equipped. All teachers heading into these classrooms have undergone extensive training on writing best practices and how to utilize the netbooks to support that pedagogy. Everyone has had a chance to go over the TPaCK reflection guide which is intended to be a framework for teachers and instructional leaders as they create a nexus of pedagogy, content and technology in their classrooms. Our training wiki can be found here: http://inspiredwriting.wikispaces.com/
Now, the calm before the storm; the indrawn breath.
We are predicting high winds of rising achievement, and storms of student publishing. We hope our teachers will ask “where did you get this information” less and ask “why do you trust it” more. We anticipate classrooms communicating... Read More » | By Dan Maas on 7/27/2009My 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.
... Read More » | By Dan Maas on 6/30/2009TPaCK stands for Technology, Pedagogy and Content Knowledge... source site available here: http://www.tpck.org/tpck/index.php?title=Main_Page we were given permission by the authors to utilize the diagram as a structure for a reflective excercise. The idea here is to think through what your classroom looks like if you have various combinations of technology, pedagogy and content with the ultimate goal of an elegant synthesis of all three. We hope this can useful for PLCs, self-reflections and walk-throughs:
... Read More » | By Dan Maas on 6/30/2009Today, we held a remote video conference with the National Educational Computing Conference (ISTE) held in Washington DC today. Embedded below is a teachertube video montage of the event. Enjoy and we'll see you in Denver for ISTE 2010!
| By Dan Maas on 6/24/2009
My previous post was about the technological advancements we have seen in LPS. This post is about our people. During a year that saw the closure of two schools and budget cuts in the midst of a terrible financial crisis nationally, our staff have continued to pursue excellence every day. Here are some accomplishments that come to mind:
Karl Fisch, Arapahoe High School, was recognized as the ISTE Technology Leader of the Year for 2009 and will be recognized at the NECC conference next week. We were proud to nominate him and we support his innovative work at the school. His colleagues Anne Smith, Kristin Leclaire, Maura Mortiz, Brian Hatak and others are setting the pace for 21st Century learning both in the district and around the world. Karl will be a featured speaker at the TIE Conference.
Steven Newell, Sandburg Elementary, was just recognized with the APEX Top Tech Teacher award for his work with technology in robotics, 21st Century learning, engineering... Read More »
| By Dan Maas on 6/11/2009Sometimes, we move so quickly that we fail to take time to take stock of our progress. Here are some facts about technology progress at Littleton Public Schools:
All schools are connected via a Fiber-Optic network operating at 2 Gigabit speeds thanks to good partnership with the cities of Littleton and Centennial and the Comcast corporation.
Internet access for the district is at 100 Megabits per second and will go to 200 Megabits in July with the addition of a second link leveraging Erate discounts.
All LPS schools are covered end to end and top to bottom with wifi service funded by support from the Board of Education and the LPS Foundation.
The wifi services include a network we call PODNet which allows any IP device to connect to the Internet through our Internet Filter... indeed all of our high schools encourage kids to bring their own devices like iPods and laptops to come to school without powering down.
Our Internet Content filter system is synchronized with our Active... Read More » | By Dan Maas on 6/9/2009
I created this video by remixing a previous video and inserting a couple slides hoping to create a quick soundbyte advocating for 21st Century skills within our developing standards. This link contains a draft of the 21st Century Skills and Abilities that I am most directly addressing in hopes that revision here will then drive updates in the thousand plus pages of Draft Standards: http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/documents/OSA/stand_rev/21st%20Century%20description%20draft%20Jan%2028.pdfRead More »
| By Dan Maas on 6/8/2009Several years ago, Dan Pink spoke at the Colorado Association of School Executives summer convention and I had an opportunity to work with him. We engaged in a kind of "fishbowl" keynote where we had an active blog site available and while Mr. Pink was speaking, people engaged in dialog about his points. Some folks just posted questions while others engaged in full debate in real time. Mr. Pink paused after about an hour and asked me to share some of the blog posts which he then addressed... thus making the keynote specific to the audience in the room.
This activity was patterned after a fishbowl blogging activity that Karl Fisch (one of our school technology leaders in LPS) where students blogged during fishbowl activities rather than taking reflective notes during a discussion. Later that year, Karl Fisch, Anne Smith, Maura Moritz, Dan Pink and I corresponded about some freshman level classes reading A Whole New Mind for class. We got the book added to the Board-approved list and the teachers... Read More » |
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