Schools and Technology

School Communities Will Usually Get the Websites They Deserve

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To paraphrase Phil Windley: school communities will usually get the websites they deserve.

[Tuttle SVC]

Tom Hoffman responds to Will's post about his frustration with publishing approval issues that are getting in the way of having more teachers publish at Will's high school.

My district has purchased a content management system that promised this kind of work flow, but in reality doesn't deliver it. (It also doesn't work very well with anything but Internet Explorer 6, but that is another story... ) Their idea was that the principal, or the principal's designee would sit as some sort of managing editor. Not exactly the best way to get people sharing information in a timely manner

I never understood how school districts can trust a teacher with a classroom full of six year olds, but not trust them to use good judgment when posting homework, field trip notices, or hamster birth announcements on a classroom web site.

Whittier GIS Project

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EdBlogger Praxis: Whittier School contemplates use of blogs for NSF project.Al Delgado's school in Chicago is involved with an NSF project looking at using geographical information systems with his elementary students. The official title is... "Designing Learning Environments for Teaching Scientific Argumentation and Mathematical Reasoning with Geographic Data." A description of the project can be found here.

Al has been asked to help integrate the use of web logs into the project.

Cyprien Lomas...

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Cyprien Lomas Discover SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra)One of the folks I met this weekend at edBlogger was Cyprien Lomas. He a Research Associate with Skylight: The Science Centre for Learning and Teaching at the Faculty of Science at University of British Columbia. Cyprien was one of the folks using SubEthaEdit to take collaborative notes during the sessions. It was kind of fun to be sitting up on the panel talking and at the same time watch as people take notes on what was being said.

Lewis Elementary...

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At Lewis Elementary we are in the process of updating our computer lab. We have a lab of 16 iMacs that we are moving to OS X. We also plan to set up a server so that our we can offer a home folder for each of our students, accessable from any computer in the building. After the lab is done, we plan to update all the iMacs to OS X. We are getting some help from Dick McPartland. Dick has just recently retired from Lincoln High School in Portland where he served as Technology Coordinator. Dick has been playing with tools such as Movable Type, Manila and Open Source solutions for student/teaching publishing, for a number of years.

Looking for information on Open Source Library Systems

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oss4lib : Open Source Systems for LibrariesIn addition to work on the computer lab and updating our iMacs to OS X, we are beginning to talk about automating our library. Our district library supervisor shared with us the costs associated with using the Dynix system that is the current school district solution. Very expensive... We got a ballpark figure of $5000 to $6000!, plus ongoing support costs...

So got to thinking there must be Open Source solutions. After a quick Google search I came across this site. Looks interesting, will have to some more research on this topic. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated...

Meriwether Lewis Elementary School

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lewis_screengrab.jpghttp://lewiselementary.org
I have been working on a web page for Lewis Elementary School. I have just recently started working there as the principal. Lewis is located in Portland, Oregon, and is part of Portland Public Schools. I am using Movable Type to run the site, but for the most part it will not be a weblog, but rather I am using Movable Type as a content management system. It is very much in the beginning stages, but hope to incorportate RSS feeds and such in the near furture.

Visit to Providence Schools...

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Today I had the opportunity to visit with Tom Hoffman and some of the faculty he works with at Fortes Elementary and Feinstein High School in Providence, RI. It has been a busy day, full of visits to classrooms and discussions about technology use with assessment.

Fortes has a facinating museum program and a very interesting history. Mrs. Weinberg demonstarted STEP, an assessment visualization tool being piloted from Inquirium.

Feinstein has a program that is grounded in performance based assessment. KC Perry and Tom Hoffman demonstrated their homegrown system for tracking student progress.

The system is built on Python and Zope and is web accessable.

More to write later, but it has been a very interesting day. Tomorrow I leave for New York to hook up with Will Richardson and to visit Joe Luft and the Brooklyn International School.

Oregon Writing Project...

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Oregon Writing Project While visiting a school today I saw the flyer for the upcoming Oregon Writing Project summer session at the University of Oregon -- TEACHING WRITING IN THE INTERNET ERA... Love the title... The work of folks like Joe Luft, Pat Delaney, Will Richardson, Al Delgado and others gives one an idea of what can be accomplished with the introduction of technology into the writing process.

Earlier this week Joe Luft pointed to an article in the Washington Post about student use of technology for writing... Click by Click, Teens Polish Writing (washingtonpost.com)

They write more than any generation has since the days when telephone calls were rare and the mailman rounded more than once a day.

While making the obligitory nod to those who fear that we are raising a generation of students who will submit their term papers via their phones... it was for the most part positive.

I watch my daughters IM and email with friends and think, boy it might be a pretty good time to be an English teacher... if it just wasn't such a bad time to be in education... :-)

ASCD San Francisco...

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I had the opportunity over the weekend to meet several folks who I have known from their work on the web, but never had the opportunity to meet. Will Richardson and Pat Delaney are two educators doing exceptional work that utilizes the web as a tool for student writing and the sharing of ideas. Had dinner with them the other night along with Ilene Aginsky of Intel. ....

Bridge Testing

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bridges_poster.jpg Yesterday I visited Mike Scott's 3rd grade classroom at Buckman. Mike and his students have been learning about bridges. Yesterday the students tested their bridge designs. Captured one of those tests with my Canon S45.... Click the image to view a short Quicktime clip...

Girls and Computer Science Classes

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Where the Girls Aren't Anyone who has ever tried to pry a girl offline knows that girls like computers. They just don't understand how they work. Computer science, the mathematics-based study of programming, is so unpopular among girls that even the most rigorous girls' schools rarely find enough students to fill a class. Tech-minded teachers worry that programming is to this generation what math was to their mothers -- a boys' club preventing girls from getting a foothold in the technological world.

Wireless Access In The Classroom

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New York Times: Professors Vie With Web for Class's Attention Universities are rushing toward a wireless future, installing networks that let students and the faculty surf the Internet from laptop computers in the classroom, in the library or by those ponds that always seem to show up on the cover of the campus brochure. But professors say the technology poses a growing challenge for them: retaining their students' attention.