Celebrating Our Faculty's Accomplishments

 A few months ago, our tech department launched a new technology blog-St. Christopher's Tech Central Got Tech?! Now a blog itself is not a new concept but rather than having posts written by the techies, we've been soliciting teachers to share their successes. In addition to those posts, we post information about training opportunities, tech tips, and controversial articles.

As a result, we have teachers from our lower, middle, and upper schools sharing and commenting on the blog posts.  The asynchronous discussions are taking place and our teachers have been expressing their opinions and applauding their colleagues' efforts.  But perhaps the best part about the blog is that it is written by the faculty and causing what I like to call positive peer pressure.

So if you have a few moments, please stop by and write a comment and show our faculty that they have an audience considerably larger than our school community.   

Reflecting on the Google Teacher Academy for Administrators

Having had some time to take in all the information from the GTAdmin, I still find my mind swimming with the  multitude of ideas and possibilities this forum has provided.  I was surrounded by fabulous educators from "venti sized" school districts to small public and private schools and every possible combination in between.  But the most impressive aspect of this group of educators was their passion and desire to enhance the learning process.  An enhancement that is not limited to students but one that is shared with all constituents connected to their respective schools.

That said, the amount of information we received was incredible.  There were practical solutions for mundane problems, creative solutions for assessing student performance, solutions for enhancing communication, solutions for giving student and teachers control over their learning environment and the list goes on and on.   Mark Wagner reminded us that we most likely felt as if we were drinking out of a fire hose but our group handled the volumes of information with grace.

Image Credit: http://www.funnysalescartoons.com/photo/funny-sales-cartoon-on-sales-4

Our collective and individual epiphanies at #gtadmin were emotional, inspiring, and perhaps can only be matched by a child's excitement having arrived at Disney World for the first time.  


Yes, this was a Google sponsored event and yes it focused on Google Apps, but the real take away from the academy is that it wasn't so much about the technology but it was about learning and building relationships.  The lead learners, by the way I love that description for the presenters, were as Sir Ken Robinson puts it, "In [their] Element".  They love what they do, they love what Google Apps provides for their school family, and they are transforming their schools.     


What am I looking forward to?  I am anticipating the ongoing conversations with this group of educators.  To me, it seemed like the dialog was just getting started when it ended.  We need to keep this momentum going.  We will need each other when things get difficult, we need to celebrate our schools' successes, and share our failures.   We need to discuss authentic assessment, differentiated instruction, the college process, and a multitude of other issues as the face of education continues to evolve.

Finally, a word of thanks to Google, WestEd, Cue, and all of the lead learners for sharing.

The World is Our Classroom, a flickr group

This year I decided to participate in a daily photo journal along with quite a large number of educators from around the world. As one can imagine the diversity and variety of photos is just spectacular, but recently, 2 photos caught my eye- Jo Fothergill's The Classroom and @Allanahk's Old School Room.  After seeing these photos, I decided to create a flickr group called: The World is Our Classroom.

So what am I after?

About The World is Our Classroom

The goal of this flickr group is to collect images of classrooms and or school buildings from around the world. By providing a global perspective we will be able to view the similarities and differences in the learning environments we provide our students.

Now I have yet to add a photo of my school, but I will do so soon.  Please join us as we look at the classrooms and schools from around the world.

image credit: http://www.subtletea.com/schoolhouse.JPG

A student's creative solution

Recently, our instructional technologist, Brian Zollinhofer, aka @zollinhofer, shared an email he received from a student.  He posted the email as a blog post on our school's tech blog, but I felt it needed to be shared here as well. Enjoy!

Last night, I got the following email from a student at home:

I need help with recording a photo story at home.

At the time, I wasn’t really sure what Billy meant, or how I could help.  I eventually figured that he needed a way to record his voice into his Photostory project.  Perhaps the program was having problems.  Perhaps he didn’t have a microphone to record his voice.  It just wasn’t clear from the email.

About an hour later, I received another email:

Never mind My Rock band mic [for the Xbox 360] works

I actually chuckled at Billy’s problem solving.  Instead of giving up, he thought of other ways he used his voice with technology.  The game Rockband came to mind and he realized that he was able to plug his microphone into his computer.  Good job thinking outside the box!  There’s proof that video games aren’t entirely bad.

Image credit: 

http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x68/CRAZYTONTA/creativity.gif

Google Teacher Academy for Administrators

It happened. I was accepted to participate in the Google Teacher Academy for Administrators.  So what exactly does this mean? It means that in March I will be traveling to San Antonio, TX along with 49 other administrators from around the country to participate in an intensive workshop that is "designed to create a strong professional learning community of administrators who support each other over the course of a year, so if you are not local, you must be willing to be resourceful with all technologies to facilitate communication and collaboration with your fellow Google Certified Teachers." 

I am very excited about this opportunity and I am already amazed by how quickly this group of admins has started to network using Twitter.  By comparison, I am coming from a very small school, a JK-12 private school, but I suspect most of our issues, concerns, gripes, and observations are similar with respects to teaching, learning, personnel, and the role of curriculum.  

With that, let the sharing and learning begin!

Quote taken from: http://www.google.com/educators/gtaforadmins.html

Getting too comfortable with your PLN or Social Network: Colorful Acronyms

Is it possible for one to get too comfortable with their PLN or Social Network? If the past few weeks are any indication, I would have to say yes. So what exactly am I suggesting here? Well it's just an observation, but I am often surprised by tweets and or Facebook status updates that contain colorful acronyms or a missing letter from certain 4 letter words from professional colleagues, friends, and others. Now I am not guilty of using colorful language but I am particularly careful where, when, and with whom.  As role models for our children, students, and young faculty we must be vigilant and remind ourselves that our digital footprint extends much further than our PLN, friends, or followers.

So, is it necessary to use these acronyms or replace a letter so the profane word is not "obvious"?  I hope it is not because it reminds me of the message I convey regularly to my students and my own children. If you get comfortable using language a certain way, it becomes more difficult to control when it should or should not be used  and I believe the same is true with tweets and status updates.

The Bugs Bunny cartoons figured this out a long time ago.  There was no need to use an acronym or "misspell" the term, they kept the meaning hidden but it was still an exclamation. Now, I really respect my PLN and friends on FB but I can't help but wonder why it persists.  Our audience is much larger than we can ever imagine which means we must avoid this pitfall and not get too comfortable with our PLN or social network.  Young people struggle enough with the concept of knowing your audience, so let's avoid giving them mixed messages because the acronyms and misspellings are not fooling anyone.

Virtual Spanish Immersion

In a couple of weeks, our 8th grade Spanish students at St. Christopher's School will be participating in a new curriculum that provides a form of immersion that does not require visiting a Spanish speaking country.  According to Fran Turner, Director of International Studies and 8th grade Spanish teacher, it is an opportunity for our students to be paired up virtually with another school in Colombia in an effort to offer our students structured interaction with native speakers on a regular basis.  Please take a moment to watch the interview with Fran as she describes this wonderful opportunity, which was made possible by a grant from the Bowles Endowment for Innovation and Creativity in Education  at St. Christopher's School.