After a great flight down from Shanghai today I find myself preparing for 4 presentations in 3 days. You can bet I’ll be calling on my network of educators throughout the week. So don’t be surprised if I Skype ya, ask you to join me in WizIQ or Elluminate or ask to have a twit shout out to Administrators from […]
Support Structure You can have the best educational portal, and the best infrastructure, but if you do not have the support in place to both help teachers use/understand technology and support infrastructural needs then the money you spend on hardware will be lost. Throughout the late 90s and into the 21st century schools have spend a lot of money on […]
I had the honor Monday (and I do see it as an honor) to give a 40 minute presentations to the whole high school student body at my school (350+) plus teachers. It is by far the largest audience I’ve ever giving a presentation in front of and not an easy audience to start with. On top of that today […]
If technology is a tool…and we all agree it’s a tool right? Then why the heck do we need standards for it? What are we trying to prove? If you have a technology class..then yes there should be skills (a.k.a. standards) you are trying to teach students. But…if it’s just a tool in the classroom that we’re using to produce […]
Technology whether we like it or not reaches into everything we do in schools today. The Student Information Systems that run our schools hold more critical data than any other single program in most schools. As we design our school wide systems in the 21st Century we must think about how all this information is connected, how and who needs […]
Sharon, one of my students in my PSU course that I’m teaching this Fall recently wrote this after reading George Siemens’ Knowing Knowledge As a teacher, that is a powerful statement, something to ponder. It makes me question how I teach, am I preparing the students to have the skills to obtain knowledge rather than feeding them knowledge? Has technology […]
Today I sat down with the 8th grade team who asked me to come in and talk about blogging. All 8th graders have blogs and all of the teachers now how blog. But “Now what?” I’ve only listened to half of Clarence Fisher’s Keynote for the k12online conference (Don’t want to ruin the LAN party fun!). He touches on how […]
It seems in the past month I have read about, have had e-mails from, or read twitter messages looking at creating or at least revisiting their school technology plans. I guess the 3 year plans are coming do, or schools are starting to understand that the technology plan written in the late 90’s or even early 2000’s will not work […]
The K12online Conference kicks off today with a Pre-Conference Keynote from David Warlick. I haven’t watched it yet but plan to later today as I make final adjustments to our K12online Shanghai LAN Parties. This year we even have our own wiki site and once again have planned four 3 hour sessions where we will bring the conference local. Our […]
I’ve actually been back for a couple of days, but hit the ground running getting in at midnight and having to full on PD days and friends visiting from the States and then Dubai. Kashgar was wonderful. Different people, different culture. We had to keep reminding ourselves that we were in China and had not actually left the country. You […]