International Studies Immersion Week

Each year, our school holds an immersion week during which they learn all about a given country. It's tied to their International Festival dance performance, and our Multicultural Fair. This year, we've really got our stuff together. Our curriculum coordinator and a second grade teacher Allison Archer have created a We Are The World wiki for our entire staff to use. They have preresearched materials to share with each grade level and designed whole-school "hooks" so that it is a community-wide experience. In years to come, we'll be able to reuse these resources when the "cycle" comes round again. It's a perfect example of how an online collaborative resource can benefit not only a school, but parents at home and those outside our own community as well.

By the way, we are using pbwiki for this and they have improved their bandwidth a great deal from the last time I posted about them. I have absolutely no complaints about the service. It's an ideal tool to use, easier than wikispaces at this point....

Crickweb Flash Games for All Ages

If you have not already discovered Crickweb, you're missing out. This free, highly interactive Web site from the Crick Primary School in the United Kingdom features 100s of games, all of an educational nature. My favorite are the Key Stage Two Numeracy games that teach Odds and Evens, Greater or Less Than, Money Matches and so much much more. I haven't even begun to delve into the literacy games. They're wonderful for reinforcing skills taught in the primary grades.

International Connections Overdrive

Yowza, do I feel connected! Yesterday, I spent an hour chatting with my fifth grade class partner in Gaziantep, Turkey. She's young and exuberant, having just visited the U.S. on exchange last year. Her students and ours have been involved in Webconferencing using Windows Live messenger and getting to know one another on a private Ning I have set up for them. Aysun is thrilled that they have taken such ownership over this site already, having posted hundreds of photos, videos, messages and posts in only four days since inception.

Our second grade partners, Susan Souza and Kim Cofino have agreed to host our first Skype Webconference...all the way to Thailand at 8:00 at night. We're putting together a new partnership with our first grade and a classroom in Spain, arranging an environmental studies trip to Belize through the World Leadership School and all the while trying to manage day to day responsibilities of teaching and running a technology department. I'd be exhausted if it wasn't so much fun. My favorite tool right now is something I've blogged about before--the lower quality pocket video camera. The kids are using them for everything. It's the way they document their world now.

Professional Development

Yesterday, I had a great skype meeting with the middle school technology director of the University of Milwaukee School. I wanted to pick his brain about his professional development program, especially as it pertained to technology and curriculum integration. It helped to reinforce two central ideas I have about ed tech prof development:

1. Ed Tech professional development is simply general professional development. The days of training teachers on software en masse are over. So much of what we do is simply part and parcel of the digital native's world that it necessarily pervades the curriculum. It should not be a separate subject any longer.

2. All schools regardless of money, space or staffing face the same issues of how to make professional development in general become an efficient, ongoing and daily experience for educators.

I'll be meeting with Judi Harris, at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va next month. She has spoken at NECC about Educational Technology Professional Development models. Ms. Harris has made herself available to me and a colleague for a couple of HOURS to discuss professional development models and how we can pick and choose from those models to shape one for our own community! Such generosity and spirit of sharing...

Her work, although I am only superficially familiar with it thus far, reinforces a lesson that is central to my growth as a teacher, as a wife, as a human being: there is almost no simple solution to complex problems. It's not a binary code. The best solution will be composed of bits of hands-on, small-group, peer mentoring, online and more. It's a postmodern solution for our postmodern world. I have to keep learning that over and over. Living in the gray zones.

Image Credit: www.yourgaragepros.com

Upgrading Our Network, Connections and Routers

Our Technology Support Specialist Pavel and I have met with four different companies/contractors in the last few weeks, all of whom have wildly differing ideas on the best way for us to improve our school's network. We currently have a DSL connection. I dunno how we have managed so well this far. Of course, we've had our moments of taking FOREVER to load Web pages when all 18 children in a class are accessing at once. However, we've rarely been down and it does the job most of the time. Our thought was that we should upgrade to a T-1 connection. Almost all of the vendors had thoughts about that:

1. We should have a T-1 with a cable backup.

2. We should have a cable connection with a T-1 backup, or our current DSL backup.

3. We should have just cable.

And that's just the internet connection. I'll have to post another day about routers. I honestly didn't know much about routers before this whole process. I still don't know much about them, but I know that everyone has a different opinion on whether Cisco is worth the time and money, whether Sonicwall is as good, if you can just use refurbished equipment and save tons while losing none of the capabilities. My goodness! And I have until Friday to put together recommendations for the Financial Committee of my school's board. I take comfort in the fact that many have gone before me and they all did the best they could as well.

Image credit: www.nph.com.au

Upgrading A Network

Our school has had the same network setup since its original installation back in 1997. We're still subscribing to DSL and our wait times show that. Though our fundraising committee was primed to raise money for laptops, I had to be the grinch and put a halt to their efforts. The perplexity on their faces told me that they didn't exactly know how to SELL a network upgrade to donors. How do you explain it, other than role playing sitting at the computer, waiting for a web site to come up? Maybe throw some paper airplanes to show what the "dead time" can lead to? That's such an 80s movie cliche. I have to giggle writing it.

Anyway, anyone who has ever attempted such a project knows that there are financial committees to report to, quotes to obtain, presentations to give. It's a lot of work, but it's a whole lot better than spending $50K on laptops only to find that we can't actually USE them on our current network. I thank the AIMS TecGathers and the AISGW Breakfast Roundtables, and all of my colleages at those meetings, for preventing me from making that mistake. You see, some of them have made it first! I know it's not the most compelling blog post ever, but it's where I'm at.

Image Credit: http://www.igniteseattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/445392913_53c13e695d.jpg