Oregonians are a pretty hardy lot when it comes to rain, but every once in a while we have to call an inside recess. When that happens our some of our students have the option of going to the gym. There are PE teacher, Ms. Layman, has several activities set up for them including one that involves an iPad running YouTube, a Chromecast a data projector. With this setup she projects dance videos on the wall and the kids get to take part as the did today dancing to the Gummi Bear song. Click the image above to take a look.
Pamela Kennedy: Room 17 at Lewis
In an earlier post I mentioned the upcoming IntegratedPDX conference taking place later this week in Portland. I'm looking forward to attending and taking part, but another reason I'm looking forward to the conference is that one of my teachers, Pamela Kennedy, will be leading a session on Thursday. Her topic is the use of Evernote as a portfolio system.
Pamela Kennedy is a 3rd grade teacher at Lewis Elementary. Pamela's classroom incorporates seating and standing options that allow students to work in ways that best fit them. You can read more about Pamela's classroom and the work of her students on her class blog: http://mskennedy17.wordpress.com. Be sure to also follow her on Twitter: @pamelakennedy17.
And if you will be attending IntegratedPDX this week, make a point of meeting her.
Ms. Kennedy's classroom. Room 17 at Lewis Elementary School... Photo by Pamela Kennedy
Accelerate & IntegratedPDX14
Photo Credit: rwentechaney via Compfight cc
I am looking forward to a couple of events this week.
IntegratedPDX is a education conference put on by the folks at OETC that attempts to connect people in the educational technology world with one another and provide a venue for the sharing of ideas and strategies that focuses on learning and how technology can be used to support this.
Photo Credit: rwentechaney via Compfight cc
The conference starts Wednesday night with a keynote by Mark Frauenfelder, founder of BoingBoing and co-editor and founder of Make magazine. The organizers of this conference do an excellent job bringing in speakers, who are at first glance, are not connected to traditional education, but are always connected to learning and how people learn.
The traditional keynote is where this conference stops being like most education conferences. It doesn't have speakers, but rather facilitators/presenters. The goal of each session is not to have participants sit and listen to someone up in front of the room, but rather get people in the room talking and sharing and learning from one another. I'm looking forward to facilitating a session, Making Connections - Supporting Educational Technology as a Building Leader, on Thursday with Tricia George.
Another event that is connected to IntegratedPDX, is Accelerate. Accelerate, also sponsored by OETC, has a similar format to IntegratedPDX, but is only one day and the focus is on school leaders. This takes place on Wednesday. Tricia and I are also doing a session at Accelerate, Juggling the Possibilities: Promoting personal growth and teacher innovation through technology in K-12 schools.
The hashtag for both events is #ipdx14
Signs of Spring...
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What a difference a week makes. Last week Portland was covered in about 6 inches of snow. Sunday saw temperatures near 50. The daffodils planted in the front of the school are coming up and in a few weeks should be in bloom. A nice sign that winter is ending and spring is just around the corner.
Nexus 7 Tablets and Chromebooks at Lewis Elementary
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This year our 5th grade students at Lewis Elementary are 1:1 using Chromebooks and Nexus 7 tablets. Basically for each 5th grade classroom we have a half set of Chromebooks and a half set of Nexus 7 tablets. So for every two students, they share a Chromebook and a tablet, and at any given time there is a device available for every student. We chose this option because of cost, and also because we wanted to take advantages of the strengths of each tool and have devices that tied into our Google Apps for Education ecosystem.
timlauer's photo on Instagram
The Chromebooks provide a traditional laptop experience. The tablets allow us to utilize a good quality camera, along with easy audio recording. Quite a few students also use the Nexus as a writing tool. They dictate a first draft using the voice to text feature to convert spoken words to text into Google Docs. They then can easily open up the doc on their Chromebooks for more editing.
All in all we are very happy with our mixed environment. As I mentioned we use Google Apps for education and the ability to login to multiple accounts on both the Chromebooks and the Nexus 7 tablets makes the process of students accessing their work a pretty easy process.
We also utilize the Hapara Teacher Dashboard which helps teachers easily keep track of student work. I'll have more to say about Hapara in a future post.
Snow in Portland
timlauer's photo on Instagram
timlauer's photo on Instagram
timlauer's photo on Instagram
For the most part winter in Portland means rain. Temperatures between the mid 30s and high 40s, and lots of grey sky and interesting clouds (I love the clouds in Oregon.) So when we do get snow it is special. The kids at school get excited, the adults too. Also, snow is often times followed by freezing rain, making walking, let alone driving, pretty treacherous.
Last Thursday snow was forecast in Portland, and sure enough it started to snow at my school around 10:30 am. With a significant amount forecast, my district made the decision to dismiss school at 1:00 pm. Our district uses a variety of tools to get information to parents. These include automated phone calls, automated email and texts, posts to the district web page, posts to the district Facebook page, and posts to Twitter, not to mention announcements on local legacy media. By 2:00 pm we only had 4 students still at school. By 3:30 all students had been picked up.
In total we got about 6 inches of snow. Anything over an inch will shut down the city, so you can imagine that over the weekend things slowed down quite a bit. Streets were turned into ski and sled runs.
Saturday night the temperature rose and the snow turned to freezing rain. Sunday we woke up to everything covered in ice. School was again called off on Monday. As I write this all major streets are clear pavement, but parking areas are still covered with snow, and most folks have not been able to clear their sidewalks. I can attest to the difficulty of chipping and clearing frozen snow.
No word yet on school on Tuesday, but I anticipate a possible late opening. I was out at school today and the side streets near the school are hard to pass.
Looking forward to the return of the rain later in the week...
Snow Day...
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We got a bit of snow and cold temperatures this week. Thursday snow was predicted and right on que, it started snowing around 10:00 am. Our school district made the decision to call for an early dismissal at 1:00 pm. By 2:00 pm we only had about 4 students left. I stayed with the last one until about 3:30. By then it was only I and the evening custodian in the building.
I went out to my car, but it would not start. I have an older diesel and when it gets cold (well cold for Portland) it has trouble. I called the local gas station for a jump, but he could not get it started. So ended up taking the bus most of the way and then walking home.
No school today in Portland.
SPARK: Ideas will fly...
On Friday, I had the opportunity to attend an event sponsored by OETC. The event, SPARK, was an opportunity to listen to 5 speakers ( Joe Morelock, Amber Case, Ben Grey, Ruben Puentedura, and Dan Ariely) discuss ideas about education and the interplay of technology and learning, in a setting that encouraged conversation and interaction. It was refreshing to listen to the speakers and then discuss the ideas with others at the event. A friend and i were lamenting that the professional development that we as administrators have to sit through, is nowhere near as engaging as this was. Wondering why the monthly leadership meetings that I attend can not be more like this event. Video of the talks will be posted in the near future.
OETC is also the organization behind the annual Integrated series of conferences. IntegratedPDX is coming up at the end of February in Portland. It is a very accessible event, allowing speakers and participants many opportunities for conversation and interaction. This year they are adding a one day strand specifically for school administrators. Accelerate for Administrators will be an opportunity to for school administrators to learn and share in a setting that encourages connections. If you are interested in the confluence of technology and learning, this looks to be a great event. I'm looking forward to taking part.
timlauer's photo on Instagram
timlauer's photo on Instagram