To Learn Twice

Sitting here at home reflecting on a great week at the IL-TCE Conference and specifically what I learned as I prepared and presented my presentation. Of course I had the advantage of being the teacher, so I learned the most out of anyone in the session. The presentation itself was on tagging. Well, not exactly tagging. It started with the act of tagging and using it on the low end of Bloom's Taxonomy to categorize and sort information. My goal was to move beyond that and use the technology to get kids to get to higher order thinking in comparing and contrasting, analyzing, and synthesizing information. One of the examples I used was comparing 2 tag clouds of past presidential speeches : Easy to see some shifts in focus over the course of a presidency. My point was - which is more interesting and impactful for a kid? Telling them what happened during a presidency or giving them some clues to the mystery and letting them find out for themselves? I don't want to go through t...

Wow - almost a month from the last post until now. I just submitted the State tech plan - that has dominated my life for the past 2 weeks. It is incredible that the state makes us do all of this for a document that nobody will ever read. I have pretty much completed my district tech plan (that is right - I wrote 2 plans - because the state one is that worthless) I have also been working on my presentation for the ICE conference . Finished that up too (thanks Charlene and David for the tips and feedback!) I am looking forward to getting back to reading and educating myself again. Google reader just got the "mark everything as read" treatment.

In my last post I talked about the questions I was about to ask over 100 teachers in my district about over-arching tech questions. It was a great chance to hear what they are thinking and to share with them my philosophies about what tech should look like in our schools and my philosophies about how it impacts instruction (or doesn't). If you are interested in the responses you can find them here: http://www.hcthiele.com/QA2008.pdf I used a tag cloud to give a visualize the common terms that were used to answer each question. The most common terms throughout the document are: Made at tagcloud.com I think this will be a helpful document. It gives me a good idea of the feelings of members of the district and raises even more questions for us to answer. The result of this, and other work this year, will be a 3 year comprehensive technology plan - getting close now.

We have finished the tech request portion of the tech plan and I will begin to put together a 3 year budget. Over the next 3 days I will meet with each school to discuss some big picture questions. I am opening the session with a powerpoint that you can download here: techplan.zip We also shared the district technology vision Here are the questions - any answers? Technology Planning Starter Questions Teacher 1-1 Laptops – · What would be the curricular impact of 1-1 laptops for teachers? · Staff Development o What would be the staff development required for 1-1 laptops to effectively impact the curriculum? o If we go to a 1-1 initiative should teachers be required to participate in a certain number of staff development hours to receive a laptop? Is so, how many hours over the lifetime of the computer? · What would be the most important technical features in this device? · What kind of technical support would teachers ex...

Here are the initial results of the Asus Student Trial where we have several students trying out the eee around school and home. Here is what the teacher said about the process: I've had two students try it out as a loaner and many others just test it out for a few minutes or so. I've also gone and talked to other teachers and students in their classes here about it and what possibilities it holds. It is now with another student and I'll get it back from her next week and pass it on. Here are the responses from two students who had the pc for a few weeks and what they thought. One is male, other is female. Both are AP Chemistry students. I did talk and bring the computer to share and show all levels of students and with their teachers permission brainstormed ideas if they had one. Many thought it was really cool. Here are the 2 student's responses. Their names have been removed (question #1) Student #1 2. What is your gender? male 3. H...

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...

I posted this comment in response to David Warlick's Two Assumptions I think there is a delineation here between some different tools. As you have been pointing out, each of these sites has it's own niche market. Sure our kids are using facebook for creating social networks...and they are social. This isn't the tool I want to use for classroom collaboration, because I would want my classroom to be more than social. It probably doesn't interest my kids much either, because who wants to mix their playground with work. What I think we need is a tool that allows students and teachers to work collaboratively in a sandbox that gives them the tools they need to work in a traditional learning setting or in one that is more progressive. What we need more than good social networking or collaborative tools - we need good curriculum that would benefit from these tools. We need good teachers that know how to use these tools and are willing to learn how to use them better along ...