To Learn Twice

Several of my colleagues at NECC have been asking how the website is coming. I thought I would just blog an update... The tools are coming together better than we ever imagined. Teachers will have 8 tools to add information to their website. Each of these buttons opens a form based interface that allows teachers to input specific information very quickly. This is a sample of the teacher's page where their information is populated. Here is the cool part: We are also building a personalized page where information from all of a student's classrooms and activities is collated in one place. 1 stop shopping for students and parents. You can see the student page graphical design here .

Sometimes serendipity is not so serendipitous. Yesterday I received the new T.H.E Journal and the cover story is "The Power of Parenting 2.0". Lately I have been working on focusing my thoughts on the power of parent communication and collaboration through online content. So when I saw the cover I was really excited. I figured I would have some great new groundbreaking insights to digest. Nope. It wasn't until I read the article and looked closer at the sub line on the cover that I realized my mistake. The focus of the article is on Notification tools and SIS systems and the power of informing parents about grades, attendance, discipline and other issues. They did this in February as well in another article . I get what they are getting at. There is great power about informing parents about problems and successes as they happen. It is similar to the differences between formative and summative assessment. Reinforce or change when the time is right. My problem isn...

There has been a lot of chat over the last few weeks in the mass of content I read about social networks and collaborative tools. The debates range from should we use them, if so how, does it really impact learning, are we preparing our kids correctly, and many variations on those themes. Here is where I am at - Good schools still start with good teachers Good teachers with good resources can better reach their students and teach skills Students with more resources are better prepared for the educational environment Parents that have high expectations and encourage their kids make it a lot easier for schools Technology is still an amplifier in many ways - it makes good teaching better and bad teaching worse Technology can really help instruction in 3 ways - that are completely new to education (it can also stop it when used incorrectly) Efficacy through Information - It can speed up communication and can increase the amount of information available to all stakeholders. That informati...

Last night was a huge day for our district. Our board of education approved us to move forward on a project that will revolutionize our web presence and what we can do on the web. Here are the main parts: A main site for each school in the district governed by a CMS. A branch in the site for each activity/sport/teacher/etc... with the same CMS tools Each teacher will have a portal page that will bring their customized content to them Here is the real kicker - Each student will have their own portal page that will populate with important information from around the school - and they will have the ability to post content to it - AND SHARE that content with other teachers and students This will be a collaborative web 2.0 environment that gives our teachers and students the power to change the way they work in a classroom. American Eagle has given me permission to post part of the proposal so anyone who is interested can get a better idea of the direction we are heading in. When we star...