Blogging and communication via the web:

 If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the rest of this post is superfluous.  Heritage High School Principal, Ken Mortiz sent this picture to me after returning from his trip to Sierra Leone, Africa.  His school started a project they call "MAD Week" about three years ago and raised money to build a school in Kabala, Sierra Leone.  MAD Week stands for "Making a Difference" and just looking at this picture, it is clear that the mission has been accomplished... and yet still goes on.  Several students made this trip in past years and brought back impassioned stories about the poverty and the courage of the people of Kabala.  This picture is on the steps of the school that kids built for other kids.

Don't ever believe you can't change the world. 

...

Laptop projects are popping up everywhere and some even go away (see NYTimes article on school dropping laptop project).  Recently, a small Indiana school implemented a laptop rental program using HP Mini netbooks charging students $55/year to fund their initiative (see Indiana DOE press release). 

In Littleton, lots of kids have access to technology from iPods, to netbooks, to smart-phones and even laptops.  Indeed, our high schools all welcome student-owned technology and we provide filtered wifi services that our students can freely access at school.  Yet, after two years of wifi availability, I don't see digital technology squeezing out paper and pencil in the study halls and cafeterias I walk through to see kids doing their school-work.  A curious sophomore asked me what I was peering at as I scanned an area full of kids doing homework and when I told her, she remarked "oh, I bring my...

On October 30th, 2009, guests from the NSBA T+L conference visited East Elementary School. Lunch was provided by the NSBA as visitors came to hear our vision for technology, visit classrooms, hear from students and dialog with staff. But before going further, there are some factors that are important to note. For two days prior to this visit, we had one of those classic Colorado blizzards; 60 degrees on Tuesday, 14 inches of snow by Thursday morning, and the sun peeking out on Friday. Also, one might notice that 10-30-09 would be the last school day before Halloween which fell on a Saturday this year... meaning kids wanted to have some celebrations on this day.

The miraculous staff at East Elementary had dress up time and a parade in the morning, but by 11:00, they flew into action and transformed their school into readiness for important visitors. In a matter of minutes, you would not have guessed that it was the day before Halloween. The school was spotless and clean. The sheer volume of quality...

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...

...

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

...

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...