Shift to the Future

I recently had the privilege of visiting a couple of our middle school classrooms.  Our middle schools have students in grades 6-8 and they are organized into teams of approximately 120 students who share teachers for their core subjects then explore other topics or subjects with specialist teachers. One classroom I visited is led by a technology specialist teacher James Gill .  I wrote briefly about this visit in a previous post Preparing Students through Educational Futuristics .  In this classroom, James was facilitating skills development and collaboration with a variety of technical tools including discussion boards within our my43 portal and using Google Sketchup (free) to propose designs for their new school to open in 2014.  Here is James talking about the setup for the learning activity… James talks about using discussion board to brainstorm school design Emily took the lead with a topic discussing the pros and cons of Smart boards vs. White boards and...

It’s amazing how time seems to speed up as we accumulate more personal history.  I find the seasons and yearly cycles to be coming up faster now then they did 25 years ago.  School start-up is just two weeks in the future.  September is a chaotic period in general for those in the school system and the parents of our students.  Specifically though I would like to ponder the technology agenda for the next year or so. I just read an article in FastCompany “ How TED Became the NEW HARVARD ”.  It tells the store of TED.com which is quite fascinating.  I love their mission “Ideas worth spreading”.  It is described as an educational platform.  The best minds and ideas are shared for free with the world.  TED used to be an insular conference, a closed system.  But has, through effective use of technology, transformed itself into a platform for spreading creative ideas.  I wonder how K12 can learn from this approach… In our District we...

In my last post I talked about a learning team I facilitated for school principals.  Well, I also facilitated a team of K-5 teachers last year in their journey to figure out how to use SMART boards .  This was a great experience for me to have with classroom teachers learning a new and powerful technology. SMART boards are interactive white boards (IWB) or devices that allow the user to touch the white board and manipulate objects, text, and various software tools.  It is best to mount the IWB on the wall with an LCD projector arm built in.  This way it is always available and properly aligned and calibrated – which reduces setup time and frustration for the teacher.  Then use a laptop (or desktop) on a cart to connect to the IWB.  Software on the laptop controls the IWB’s functions. Schools have embraced IWB’s all around the world.  I believe Alberta, CA has a goal to put an IWB in every classroom in every school and is well on its way to achiev...