Create, Reflect, Revise

This is a big summer for St. Christopher's School.  We have a 1:1 program launching in the fall, our school will be celebrating its centennial, and we will be opening the Luck Leadership Center in January 2012. So in the midst of all of the excitement, I find it is critical that as we create new and engaging activities for our boys, we must also be mindful to reflect and revise as needed.

A true master teacher/learner will reflect on the outcomes of their lesson or activity and will take the time to revise the approach to maximize learning.  At a recent PD activity on Google docs for the faculty, I opted to share my notes with the attendees rather than give them hard copies.  In so doing, I was able to augment the notes with their ideas and suggestions after the class.  It was quite easy to amend the notes and best of all, I didn't have to resend an updated version because the document was shared. Having done this 2x and with several more PD sessions remaining throughout the summer, my latest reflection has prompted me to give the participants editing capabilities so we can truly benefit from our collective efforts.

We've been using this approach in our tech dept meetings to collect minutes and document action items so why not extend it to the classroom. It's like a wiki on steroids with the benefits of concurrent users.

While most of us are in the business of creating, let's not forget to take the time to reflect and revise.

St. Christopher’s is now a Google Apps for Education School

In December 2010, St. Christopher's became a Google Apps for Education School. This program provides educational institutions with a suite of tools that will provide our students and teachers with greater opportunities for communication and collaboration internally and also with students and teachers from around the world.

Why move to Google Apps? With the pending 1:1 laptop program in the MS and US, the tech department believed this would provide our students and teachers with tools that supports the list of Essential Skills for the 21st Century developed by the thinking task force. In addition to supporting those skills, Google Apps is a web based product that doesn't require the installation of software or a specific operating system(OS) to run. And best of all, using Google Apps for education comes at no cost to the school.

Beta Testing Google Apps: We currently have over 200 students and teachers using Google Docs in each of the 3 divisions.  Google Docs is 1 of 6 applications available through Google Apps.  Essentially, Google Docs is an office suite that provides word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, forms, and drawings.  File storage is done in the cloud(on Google's servers) and students and teachers can share files easily. NO MORE THUMBDRIVES and hopefully less paper.

Will STC be abandoning Microsoft Office in 2011? No.  We plan on phasing out Microsoft Office for students and teachers but the tech department needs to evaluate if Google Docs will satisfy all curricular requirements.

Will STC start using Gmail? Possibly. Email is a very complex server application and we have intentionally steered clear of interrupting service during the school year because of the complexity. Serious consideration however is being given to providing students with Gmail perhaps as early as the Fall of 2011 but additional research needs to be done.

Please revisit this blog to see what other tools we are using to support our boys.