And we are off...

Tweets from https://twitter.com/lewiselementary/lists/lewis

This past Thursday marked our first day of the new school year. I am very excited to see what the year brings.

On the technology front, we are pretty much 1:1 with Chromebooks in grades 3-5. It has been nice to see our grade level teams begin to collaborate and discuss instructional strategies for use of the technology, and to share and learn from one another.

Also several more classrooms and staff members have created Twitter accounts to share and document their work. Am looking forward to following those posts. To help with that we have created a Twitter list composed of all the Lewis Twitter accounts. You can follow along at the link below.

http://twitter.com/lewiselementary/lists/lewis

Playing Around with Status Board 2

A local Portland software company, Panic, has a nice little iPad app called Status Board. The app allows you create a message board type of display that can include various elements, including  calendar items, Twitter feeds, images, local weather info, and other types of information that can be displayed on an LCD TV. 

At Lewis we have a large LCD monitor mounted near our main office. We have been using it in conjunction with an AppleTV to display school photos. When we originally set it up, it was connected to an old laptop and displayed various widgets in addition to recent photos from our school Flickr feed. The laptop eventually gave out and was replaced with an AppleTV. This allowed us to show the photos, but nothing else.  I have been looking for a tool that would allow me to continue to display images, but also display other school based information along with the images. Status Board does this quite well.

Status Board comes with several built in modules, and with a little coding, allows you to display other types of information such as charts and tables, even local transit information. I am thinking of doing some work to display information such as the school lunch menu, and our average daily attendance. All in all a very visually appealing tools for displaying information.