Ipod touch pilots and website launching

Piloting ipod touches continues.  How might they enhance or assist teaching and learning?  A must read website is iear

We are planning to launch the new website April (and that's no joke).  Please understand that this is and will be a work in progress and will be bare-bones at most.  Please view and offer suggestions.  We need help gathering and uploading information.  Visit the rough draft at http://rsu36.org.mytempweb.com/District/tabid/36/Default.aspx and concentrate on the District page and how we can make this an information portal.  School pages and teacher pages will not be available, except for Announcements and Calendars.  We would like to design the Banner pane (First Comes Learning), hopefully the students can help with this.

The Tech Time meetings this week indicated more training for Google Docs and Gmail.  

As usual a very robust week with budget discussions and other plans for the future....and if you haven't had time to view the following webcast, it is a must see
Images in Time from MLTI's Webcasts. I recommend using headphones and thinking about how you would use Comic Life. Also, I believe these webcasts are best viewed pre-recorded since you can view them at your own pace - and with popcorn :)

The ipod touches are being piloted to figure out if they are good for us... or not. I see them playing a role for gathering data, assistive technology and RTI, interactive respons systems, skill drills, and assisting literacy - to name only a few. I am interested in Nintendo's DSi XL and how it may serve our needs. Cuurently, it seems its value is for game-based education...a trend coming our way. The plan for the touches is to get a few of us familiar and then to train others for more piloting...April 7 we will convene to share opinions and train another set of teachers....One conclusion I came to was that many students have ipod touches as well as cell phones and yet school filters do not apply to these tools, yet we have blocks on Macbooks and PC's....I foresee a plan to teach digital responsibility and perhaps that discussion could happen on Facebook.....Maybe. Maybe not.

Lance Ford from OK provided more training this week for the Tanberg video conferencing tool and uncovered more ways for us to use this tool. He is attempting to provide us with a virtual field trip in April.

I am working out some training dates for mimioboards and continue to work with Jim Moulton from Apple developing PD which will focus on National Education Technology Plan, National Education Technology Standards, and TPCK - Technilogical Pedgogical Content Knowledge. These will also frame a new LF Technology Plan. Also, it would be crucial to figure out how to link core-content standards to project-based-learning opportunities.

Ipod touches and the National Educational Technology Plan

 Noteworthy:

Ten ipod touches arrived to help us leverage data management and assistive technology tools.  I am hoping that as we discuss how we might use this technology we also discuss how we can use technology to better improve teaching and learning.  As you may or may not know, we have been in discussion with Apple's PD guy, Jim Moulton, and over the next few months will be developing a professional development program for technology:  Next year will be the year to implement, use and help transform our teaching and learning experiences using technology.  To assist further, the new National Educational Technology Plan , entitled Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology, just came out from the U.S. Department of Education, and it recommends among many things:

• Be clear about the outcomes we seek.
• Collaborate to redesign structures and processes for effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility.
• Continually monitor and measure our performance.
• Hold ourselves accountable for progress and results every step of the way.

Although I have only skimmed the executive summary, I am curious how it jibes with the National Education Standards (NETS).  In any event, we have some potent guides for successfully integrating technology not to mention this essential question asked by the new plan: “Do teachers and students have access to the information and resources they need that are appropriate to their roles and what they are learning?”

As of the present,  we hope to deliver Macbooks to the elementary teaching staff by next Fall.  

Successful Tanberg Video Conferencing event with Jay and Mt. Blue

Big week this week. Thanks to Mrs. Easter and Randy Easter from Jay, we pulled off a multi-site class with the Tanberg Videoconferencing equipment on Garageband and podcasting with middle school students from three schools. From this point, we will reflect and follow up with students and staff on what to do next and how to make it better - and this be most important. Photos will be forthcoming and the event was recorded by Mr. Brinkman from Mt. Blue. Ideally, we will be able to view this in the Scheduler....via the Tanberg or right fro your laptop.

Also, the Livermore High School students learned to access their own profiles for file storage and learned to access inter-district gmail accounts. We still need to work with teachers and students to best figure out ways to utilize emails. Also, email etiquette and policies will follow. Collaboration and communication continues to improve.

We are still experiencing growth (progress and accompanying issues) with back-end server stuff. Lost and retrieved files this past week shows that backups are working but it still has to be stressed that any end-user must make backup plans for those most critical files - burn file(s) to cd, put it on the cloud(like your google docs), macbook backups, on a stick, etc.... We arranged an incremental back system but figured we ought to go with full backups....

We seemed to have discovered why long-logins were/are occurring and that the issue(s) stemmed from the older or previous server arrangements.

It was an intense week but we resolved the biggest issues and made progress with the students.