Smart Solutions K-12 Digital Academy Success
May 29, 2009
Hello! My name is Michele Gasser and I am a recent addition to the Smart Solutions K-12 team. In my role as a Professional Development Specialist, I work with Ohio school districts to help teachers learn 21st century technology tools to enhance student learning. When I joined the team in January, I hit the ground running with my first project, a Digital Academy designed for Brunswick City Schools in Brunswick, Ohio.
Kicked off in February, the nine-week program included three groups of elementary, middle and high school teachers from throughout the district. These teachers met once a week for face-to-face sessions and supplemented their learning with a Moodle course custom-designed to their needs.
The focus of the academy was to learn about the exciting ways that web 2.0 tools would enhance not only their personal learning but their teaching style as well. By the end of the nine weeks, I was hearing comments from teachers on how much more engaged their students were. The new technology certainly made an impact in their classrooms. We covered a broad range of topics including Social Bookmarking, Blogs, Wikis, Moodle, SMART Notebook software, SMART Sync classroom management software, Google Docs, Google Forms and more! (By the way, you may be familiar with some of these tools and some of them you may not. Look for more information on these in future posts.)
One of the goals of the Digital Academy was for participants to learn how to collaborate and make a team wiki. The wiki would be used to share quality lesson plans and as a one-stop-shop technology resource for the other teachers in the district. The resulting Brunswick etoos4teachers wiki is a great example of their collaborative effort and mastery of the new skills learned throughout the course.
It was exciting for me as an instructor to watch the enthusiasm for technology grow and it was just as exciting for the teachers to see the same results in their students. Just days after the Digital Academy finished up, I received a wonderful email from a kindergarten teacher with a link to a Mother’s Day project her kindergarten students made in Voicethread (one of the tools we explored in class). Their slide-show presentation consisted of students’ drawings of their mothers accompanied by audio clips of the students’ Mother’s Day greetings. It is absolutely delightful to see children this young interacting with technology. What a great way to introduce them to the 21st century!
Results like this are what make my work so rewarding. I look forward to sharing more success stories with you in the future.
Random Sites and Links
May 13, 2009
I thought that I would share some of the latest random things that I have read or seen over the last few months.
Finance
I have tried to stay away from politics in this blog. But everyone realizes that we are in the midst of one of the worst financial crises in our history. Therefore, I think it is important to share two of the best articles that I have read about the current crisis in the last few months.
“In Praise of Primitive Finance” by Amar Bhide
“Making Banking Boring” by Paul Krugman
Design
This neat site, 99Designs, allows individuals to bid on logos and web designs. It is a really innovative Web 2.0-ey way to do design work.
Voice Chat
Voxli is an extremely easy to use internet-based group chat service. I believe it was actually developed for use by computer game players, but I think this service could easily become the next standard in phone conferencing. If you are using another application, your chat continues without disruption. Imagine combining this with Google Presentation and we have a distance learning platform.
The Greatest Product Demo Ever
An Open Institutional Learning Network
This blog post is an informative window into the future of course management and data management in a school district.
6th Sense
Awesome video from the Ted Talks.
Datasets
This web site has links to hundreds of datasets from around the internet. As a former data junkie in my previous life as a consultant, I get very excited when I find easy access to data!
Top 25 Social Enterprise Web Sites
Open Source Textbooks
I recently discovered this awesome web site of Open Source textbooks. I believe the publishing industry, particularly the textbook industry, is ripe for disruptive innovations due to technology. It seems highly natural for the industry to move towards a more individualized wiki-style organization rather than large centralized publishing companies dictating the only texts to be used. The school publishing industry will soon follow the fate of the encyclopedia market.