EdTech Avenue

I am sending the following in an email to our teachers this week. I want to encourage them to not take off their thinking caps for the entire summer, just as they send out a summer reading list for students with the same intent. My hope is that they return in the fall with some fresh ideas for integrating technology as a means for creative assessment and that they use the time they have in the summer to really delve in and explore some of today’s great technologies and idea-sharing media.

• Find one educational blogger whose posts you consider valid and relevant to your teaching. Read on average at least 1 post a week, and be prepared to share what you have found during workshop week in the fall.
• Go to TeacherTube.com and find one video you could either use in one of your classes or replicate as a student project.
• Come up with one multimedia project you could use to enhance your curriculum in some way. This project could involve digital photos, music, movie clips, slides, clay animation, drawings, podcasts…
• Come up with one project in your class where you could use a blog with students. You post something and have them respond, give comments, reactions, reflections…
• Look into the following educational technology trends and buzz-words and prepare to talk about them and how they might impact not only your teaching but the learning of our students:
  • Wiki
  • Blog
  • Podcast, Webcast
  • Ning
  • Web 2.0, School 2.0
  • RSS, Aggregator, Feed
  • Streaming
  • Skype
  • Twitter, Meebo
  • Chat, Instant Message
  • Del.icio.us
• Complete the following regarding technology:
  • The one thing I wish I had in my classroom is __________.
  • One activity I wish I could do with my students is __________.
  • Technology would be easier to use in my classes if __________.

I may be setting myself up for disappointment here, but I don’t think so. I believe that the incredible staff with whom I work will come through. If just one or two teachers come back with a great idea, that energy will spark a flame that I can feed throughout the year!

A program is being offered for elementary schools to examine the “Perils and Potential of Media and Technology in Catholic Education” by NCEA, Boston College and the U.S. Conference of Bishops. It sounds like an interesting program but overlaps with NECC so I can’t get there (I would LOVE to - loved Boston last time I was there).

If you are planning to go, would you be willing to share your experiences here on EdTech Avenue? The conference is from June 21-23, 2007, in Boston, MA.

I have been working on a near-zero budget for a couple of years now.  Before that, we were blessed with grant money from Best Buy Corporate that allowed us to improve our one working computer lab and install two more - one mobile.  I used that money as frugally as I could, purchasing refurbished computers from an organization called Minnesota Computers for Schools.  They were “good enough,” but I told our administrators that, while these machines will get us up and running on limited funds, they will need to be replaced sooner than if we would buy new.  I also stated that what is really essential is that we get technology upgrades into our school operating budget so we can replace equipment on a reasonable cycle.  We are now two years A.B.B. (After Best Buy), and we are in desperate need of updates to not just one area but three.  While purchasing refurbished machines works, it is almost twice the work each year to install and support, and the end financial cost is actually higher.
I am not working with techno-phobic administrators.  They realize the importance of technology in the lives of our students, but there is simply no money.  This year I submitted a technology plan to the state in hopes of eligibility for E-Rate funds, but what I’m hearing in the blogosphere is that these types of funding programs are fading.

The biggest challenge for Spellings is that her rhetoric doesn’t coincide with her actions. She says that underfunding of technology in schools is a big problem, but the Department’s failure to fund the federal Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program gives her statements no credibility. The federal Technology Innovation Challenge Grant program, the Technology Literacy Challenge Fund, the Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) program, the Community Technology Centers, and the Regional Technology in Education Consortia – they are all gone. The only thing left is EETT, and now the feds have proposed zeroing out that budget yet again.

To say that this scares me as far as my job is concerned is certainly an understatement.  For those of us in the private sector, I can only think the funding is even less accessible.  I hope we can get some federal help and that my hours and hours of composing a four-year technology play are not in vain.

I hope I can convince my administrators of the urgency with which we must now seek out funds to budget for technology for school operations.  I will continue the crusade!

In the interest of keeping things simple, I’ve been looking into re-working this site so that it is a blog first and Archdiocese tech-connection second. When I first started, I didn’t realize I could post static pages on a blog site, and that I could create the forms and such that I needed from within the WordPress database using Plugins. I spent many hours matching CSS to a template I had found for a the static site to the blog for consistency because I thought I had to!
I hate changing things mid-stream, but better now than when I have hundreds of readers (ha!).  For the few of you who subscribe to my feed, it will be changing over the next couple of weeks as I get everything moved over. The full site will be http://edtechaveue.com, with links to the Archdiocese information from there.  Thanks for your patience.

I was prompted by my reading today of Wesley Fryer’s Needed leadership qualities post. I am still catching up on some archives, and while many articles have been bookmarked for viewing and reflecting later, this one spoke to me immediately, especially after having read Scott Mcleod’s What makes administrators effective technology leaders? post from last week. I am always looking for ideas about how to become a better leader in my field, and these articles were definitely food for thought.

I think the biggest question is where the leadership is coming from.  It’s fairly evident that it must come from more than one person to really implement systemic change.  While I am the main driving force behind integration implementations and strategies at my school, I would not be nearly as effective without the support I get from my principal and veteran teachers.  Meeting resistance from them would make my job miserable.  I think there are probably many different leadership models that work, depending on the personalities of the people in those situations.  We in smaller K-8 schools have a wide range of responsibilities, job descriptions and authority, so what works for me might not work for someone in the next school.

My process is working so far, and as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I was taken off-line slightly last year and we lost some momentum.  Before that I was making great progress with a combination of group training and individual help (that was after I realized I couldn’t start everyone at the same level; a similar situation was described here by Scott Elias).  I tried to find where teachers could first replace an existing task with one that uses technology, and they responded well and took off on their own adding enhancements to the lessons.  I also implemented electronic grading software, making them “have to” use technology for their own organization.  Amazingly, the teachers who were most resistant are the ones who can’t live without it today!  This year we’ve started to make up some ground, and I have a handful of teachers who are eager to plan projects for next year.  Many teachers still use technology because they have to, but slowly and steadily the number is growing of teachers who WANT to use it and see the value in creative assessment and student ownership of a technology-produced project.  Having this new network of ideas and shared situations in the edublogosphere has really helped to re-energize me in regards to being an integration guide for our teachers.

Please share your strategies, what works and what doesn’t, and maybe we can all gain a new perspective as we look to planning for the 2007-08 school year!  Are you a part of the hiring process and/or evaluation process for teachers?  Are you the main decision-maker for technology purchases?  Do your teachers respond to group classes and/or individual training?  How do you handle resistant teachers and/or administrators in your school?

I’m new to the blogosphere as of about October of this year.  I have found a wealth of information out there and have just recently started to use Google Reader to organize it all.  I had been just adding blogs to my Google Personalized Homepage, but I found that to be not nearly as efficient.  With Google Reader I can star items I want to be able to reference later rather than having to bookmark pages in my browser.

My biggest problem right now is - how do I catch up?  How do I weed through all the archives of these great articles and posts about trends in Educational Technology?  Where (or) do I stop?  Where is the most important place for me to spend my precious time?

My personality is such that I don’t want to leave anything unread, but I know everyone will deal with this differently.  I have found that I can’t start with the oldest and work my way to today.  I’m simply too eager to see what is out there that is current - I have to see today’s news, well, today.  But I also don’t want to miss out on what was happening while I was outside the blogosphere, even though much of it is obsolete now.  The points of view of the blogs I’m reading may still have impact on me, even for posts written over a year ago.

I can’t imagine I’m alone in this dilemma as teachers begin their journey to School 2.0 via Web 2.0.  Any advice for us novices?

And it’s practical, too!

I’ve been feverishly trying to catch up on the blogosphere and finding lots of great tools I’ve missed out on being stuck back in Web 1.0.  Thank you to Scott Elias of Do I Dare Disturb the Universe for recommending Picnik, a web-based photo editing program that I am hoping and praying will take off, stick around, AND remain FREE.

I will be the first to admit, I was skeptical.  I mean really, a WEB-based photo editor?  How can that be decent?  But folks, it is.  I used it for my personal blog just to test it out and see the functionality of the Flickr connection, and I am happy.  It works splendidly.  I held a digital photo training for teachers today and was anxious to recommend it and show it off - they loved it!  It has the features and user-friendliness of iPhoto and then some, with fun advanced creatives (some of the cool ones will be with a paid version only).

Just register for free, open a photo, and basic tools are available to you: crop, resize, rotate, exposure, colors, sharpen, red-eye, etc.  Click the Creative Tools tab to really have some fun!  Then save your file to your computer or directly to a Flickr account, complete with tags, descriptions, private/public settings, and even the ability to add photos to existing sets (can’t create new ones yet).  I can edit photos from my computer or directly from my Flickr account.  And there’s website tools and widgets I haven’t even touched yet.

I can imagine terrific applications for myself - I’m on someone else’s or a library computer that doesn’t have a photo editing program, I just took some photos that I want to upload and blog about… no problem now!  I can see tons of educational applications for this too, and the kicker is the cost - $0.00.  Unbelievable.  Let’s support this software and keep it available!

Below are photos I edited with Picnik in minutes, although I reduced the size of each one equally to display them better (the high quality resolution of my camera makes them too big for this use).  The original is on the left, edited photo on the right: