Thanks again to our participants who joined us for the Lunch-n-Learn session last week! We had about 10 people attend in person and another 12 who viewed online in real time.



Here is a recording of the session:



This time, we used ustream.tv instead of the dimdim.com site and seemed to have better results this time. It felt a little weird by running two computers (the presentation station and the ustream.tv station), but it wasn't too bad. I would enjoy reading any comments about the session experience or the quality of the recording from your perspective...

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Since 2006, the National School Boards Association has selected 20 educators from across the United States to honor as leaders in the use of technology in their classrooms.  Two years ago, we were thrilled to nominate our own Karl Fisch who was selected for the 2007 awards.  This year, we again have cause to celebrate as not just one, but two LPS educators were selected!

Anne Smith is a Language Arts teacher at Arapahoe High School who routinely uses blogs to facilitate discussion, reflection and communication as students tackle literature ranging from the classics to the most modern texts you might find on the New York Times Best Sellers list.  It is a common occurence now for educators, authors, community leaders to tune in to class discussions or contribute to blog discussions.  Her class activity on the book, A Whole New Mind has involved members of our Board of Education, the Superintendent,...

What is blog storming?  Think of the old biplane days when a pilot would guide the airplane at stunning speeds through a barn bringing along a whirlwind of noise and energy into an otherwise quiet environment... well, the 21st Century equivalent might be when a classroom teacher equipped with 30 or so netbooks and a class of expert blogging students swoops down onto a blog that has posed an interesting question... and leaves some 30 comments in the space of 10 minutes!  Imagine the owner of the blog that has setup the system to alert her on each posting... all of a sudden, the email box becomes a flurry of blog comment notices!

My friends, that is blog storming and it looks like several of our teachers in LPS blog stormed at the NSBA (see the post here) in the last day or so.  No telling if more storms are on the way... because that's how we do things here in LPS.  Kids are learning to find their voices...

Thanks to everyone for joining me for lunch today to go over a few skills in Word and in Google Docs. Here is the video recording of our session. It looks like the DimDim web system froze up on the video. The audio of the session is fully recorded.

Open the blog post to watch the embedded video



We have much more comprehensive material online at this link and I encourage you to check it out:

http://www.littletonpublicschools.net/forStaff/TechnologyResources/HandoutsandHelp/tabid/246/Default.aspx

and here:

http://www.littletonpublicschools.net/forStaff/TechnologyResources/MondayModels/tabid/6984/Default.aspx

Thanks again everyone. I will continue to look to use web conferencing tools to extend the training and record the event for...

A new book showed up in my mailbox yesterday... Dr. Yong Zhao writes from his personal experience being educated in China and now serves as a distinguished professor at Michigan State University.  His message takes on the fallacies of strict adherence to measuring the success of education only through test scores.  He describes the advantages of the American education and how China and many other countries whose test scores are superior to ours... are in fact working to emulate our method.  But far from advocating for the status quo, he shares his views on what we need to do to revamp our system to be prepare students for a globalized economy.  He cherishes the individual and the independence that are hallmarks of being an American.  He advocates for supporting a passion for learning... well, he tells it better than I can.  Here is a video:

http://www.mobilelearninginstitute.org/21stcenturyeducation/films/film-yong-zhao.html

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While it seems so many of THE Journal's articles these days are really advertisements for the sponsors associated, I usually find the editorials enlightening.  Particularly this one from this month's THE Journal about the planning for the NAEP Technology Literacy assessment.  Editorial Director Geoffrey Fletcher warns of an impending train wreck as the NAEP is planning to merge three very large, and pretty disparite definitions of Technological Literacy for the planning of a national test due 2012.  Curious, I went to the NAEP report available here: http://ow.ly/jYYg

Below, I've copied the frameworks of the standards for review.  Many of these seem to suggest that every high school graduate should have a basic engineering background.  I find this interesting and question whether this is taking something that is vitally important to have among our graduates and perhaps over-emphasizing it to be a general education skill?  I certainly agree we need more and really good engineers... but should everyone...

For the past three years, the staff in the ITS department have contributed to, edited and most importantly, adopted a set of guidelines and principles for our work with technology in schools.  I am a big fan of Stephen Covey's Principle-centered Leadership approach and have tried to embrace these ideas in my efforts to provide leadership here.  It is clear to me that the combined intelligence, experience and innovation that exists in our staff far exceeds the capacity of the few of us who have the duty of leadership can provide LPS.  By empowering our team, we become more effective.  But empowerment can be scary for some leaders and the way I have been able to feel confident that the decision-making the ITS staff make on a daily basis is aligned with my vision is codified in this document.

We call it a doctrine because verbally it is too easy to confuse principles with principals [;-)  This is the latest version but is a living document.  I share this because I am proud that our team upholds these tenets...

Being 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,...

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...

All 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...