Have you heard of the Doodle 4 Google contest? The contest is for K-12 students to redesign the Google logo. Each school can submit up to six entries for this year’s theme “If I could do anything, I Would . . .”

How could you work this contest in to your curriculum and lessons?

• This may be a project the art teacher would like to take on and have the students create their designs based off their favorite artist. Students would research the artist’s style and replicate the style in coordination with the “If I could do anything, I Would . . .” theme.
• Computer teachers may want to have the kids create their design using a new computer software. This will acquaint the students with the new software while they create their Google design.
• General Education teachers could discuss current events and how they are creating the society we know today. Students could then design their Google logo as a follow up.
• Could be posed as a writing topic. Students write a story revolving around the “What I Wish for the World” theme and create their design as a supplement to their writing.

The possibilities are endless . . . how would you work this project into a lesson?

For more information about signing up your school, visit the Doodle 4 Google page.

It is hard enough for teachers to be absent from their classroom when they are sick or have a family emergency, let alone leave the classroom for a conference. But conferences are great way to network, collect ideas for your own classroom, and most imporantly learn. But how do you balance your classroom time and your personal learning time? Virtually attend a conference.

The EduCon conference will be running from January 29-31 in Philadelphia, but will also have sessions streaming live online. To participate, create an account and look at the sessions/conversations available.

From the EduCon website:

What is Educon?

EduCon 2.2 is both a conversation and a conference.

And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas — from the very practical to the big dreams.

Yesterday I had the great pleasure to meet with the IB teachers of Fairport.  I really enjoyed this meeting and the great questions posed by the group.   The theme of the presentation was providing real time access to real world resources 24/7.

The presentation slides above contain links to some of the sites that they will be able to utilize once their network infrastructure is completed this summer.

I know many of you have seen the emails your administrators have passed on requesting proposals for the 2010 TLT (Teaching, Learning, and Technology) Conference at Nazareth College, but many of you are probably wondering what the TLT conference actually is. The TLT conference is  three days filled with sessions about literacy, technology, etc and you get to decide what sessions you want to go to. Many sessions are presented by local teachers or instructional technology specialists and feature hands on time. Last year I went to sessions on Google Apps for Education, Moodle, Safari Montage, and Voicethread – this session was taught by one of our District’s Library Media Specialists.

You will walk away from the conference with some great ideas you will want to implement in the classroom, technology you want to try out,  and connections with local teachers that may help you in your professional network. I know many of you won’t want to present, but do think about attending, it would be great to see more Fairport faces!

I would encourage many you to think about presenting at this year’s conference. So many of you are doing amazing things from blogging, using a wiki, using audacity, etc.  in your classroom that you should share with local teachers. If any of you are considering presenting, but just not quite sure, send me an email or comment below, I would love to see what you are working on.

Imagine having your students watching a video on the Amazon River, from the perspective of being on a boat on the Amazon. They explore the diverse geological and cultural surroundings as the camera moves down the river…yet in this video format the students can move their view 360 degrees as the boat floats down the river. Check out the interactive video below from Yellowbird and mess around with the views as you watch it….it can be a paradigm shifter for how we make videos for kids.

Friday we met with IBM & VPN to review the final verifications of the newly installed 802.11n network at JP. They did an excellent job and we now have a wireless environment that will enable students to access technology in every instructional space in this building.  On Friday we had data throughputs over 155 MPS in the library.

This new network does have important caveats that we all need to be cognizant of.  This network is met to maximize bandwidth and connectivity for teachers and students.  This is not meant to be a public wireless network, like one might find at a coffeehouse.

• We are ONLY running 802.11N over “A” 5ghz . We have turned off all 2.4Ghz B and G radios.
• We have one Wireless Network called “Fairport Schools”
• We have only allowed the X200 teacher laptops and Mobile Labs access to the network at this time.
• We have no guest Wireless enabled anywhere, nor have we let any other piece of hardware other than and X200 on this network.
• We  see a LIVE view of every connected wireless device. This provides a high level of technical detail that will be beneficial in troubleshooting and maintaining quality wireless services.
• We will  bring up guest services after we have a proven, successful district wide structure that fully supports the difficult demands of the high density mobile classroom.

Major kudos to Ross Ciulla, Tom Devitt, John Poland, Jason Scott, and Brett Provenzano for their significant contributions to this project.

Photo by C Haglund

Earlier this year Google Wave got a lot of attention when it was introduced to the web.  There was quite a but of buzz and speculation about this being a “really big deal”, but after using it for a few months I understand why this excitement has cooled off as it is nothing more than a portal type dashboard to existing technologies.

While somewhat disappointed with Google Wave, I am very excited about the new paradigm that Google Chrome OS presents.  This is a operating system that allows someone to be on the Internet in 7 seconds from pressing the “on” button of a computer.  This OS goes right to the cloud and does not go through the laborious and lengthy start-up that Apples and PCs put their users through.  There is a good YouTube video on this OS

An important part of our visionary framework is to have technology that is web accessible.  This places an emphasis of putting our instructional resources in the cloud for students so that they can access their resources on any web accessible device.  Today it takes about 75 seconds for a student to turn on a computer and access the Internet.  Using Google Chrome OS students could shave 68 seconds off this time.  Assume a student does this 100 times in the year, that fress-up  6800 seconds for the student that other would have been spent staring at a screen waiting for the computer to startup.

From November 22-24 I attended the annual NYSCATE conference at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center. The conference brings together educators from all across New York to share and discuss technology in education.

The conference featured some amazing keynote presenters, Sir Ken Robinson (of TED Talks) and David Jakes stick out in my mind. I left both keynotes excited for what is to come for education, but also a bit concerned how the education community at large will be able to reform. The paradigm shift is large and scary and who will lead us through the shift?

Sir Ken Robinson gave an inspiring and engaging speech that revolved around the need to reinvent an education system that promotes creativity.  He pointed out that we are born creative and are educated out of our creativity. Take a minute to think about that. When students enter Kindergarten they are full of creativity, easily able to create a visual of what they are learning; project based learning. But by the time those Kindergartners are Seniors in high school, can they do the same thing? Can they create a project to show what they have learned? What can you do to promote creativity in your students? I am still trying to get obtain video or audio of the keynote, but in the meantime, check out Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talks on schools killing creativity.

David Jakes spoke of the future of education and how we need to nurture the 21st century learner, our students don’t see web 2.0 technology as web 2.0, they see it simply as the internet. Why discourage the use of social media when our students are already using it (webkinz, hotwheels, poptropica, etc)? Jakes really pushed the envelope of how education can changing when he demonstrated GE’s Augemented Reality and questioned what this type of technology could do for textbooks. Watch the video on the GE site and then ask yourself how learning could evolve if students could bring their textbook up to the computer and visualize scenes from history.

Over the next month I will be posting more reflections from the NYSCATE conference and the sessions I attended. If you are interested, some presenters posted resources from their presentations on the NYSCATE wiki.

One dimension of our technology work that is often overlooked is developing data systems that provides teachers and educational leaders with timely information that helps inform our actions to improve student learning.  This year we have been developing an articulated RTI K-12 strategy that will be very helpful for teachers who are already feeling very stretched.  A keystone to this strategy is using a new program called EXCEED by Spectrum K-12.  This work has included identifying all the assessments that are utilized with students K-12.  We have identified over 240 assessments used by teachers, most of which is New York State required assessments.  This product will allow teachers to easily access the vertical and horizontal data required to make informed decisions on the IST plans they create for students.  This software will then track the progress of the student, alerting teachers when the student falls off their desired levels of improvement.

In other words, we are trying to provide powerful tools that empower teachers with important student data in a time efficient manner which will also equate into improving student learning.

I was searching for a comprehensive list of Web 2.0 tools to share with our staff and students when I happened upon a matrix organized by Jane Hart.  This matrix presents a nicely organized array of tools that can be used by anyone with Internet access.  I am sharing this with the TVT group also as they filter out some of these tools which may be worthwhile to offer on an enterprise level.  This is important for us to offer such tools that are ad-free.  Almost all “free” tools comes with ads, and ad-free alternatives cane be offered for a fee.  Take a look and share on the ones that you feel are worthwhile for our district.