Tomorrow I have the honor of presenting at our school PTSA meeting which is solely going to be centered around one topic: technology. I love it when topics are so broad. Really, we could talk about anything and everything under the sun. What scares me a bit is that we are going to spend too much time talking about the stuff that really doesn’t matter so much.

Recently, I blogged about Apple Remote Desktop and talked about it with my PLN on Twitter. I heard the voices loud and clear where many said that ARD only distracts us from the important work that we are lucky enough to do with our students… making connections, integrating technology, developing our students into true global citizens. Tomorrow, I feel like many of the parents will want to talk about parental controls and screening software such as Apple Remote Desktop. While these topics deserve a conversation, I want to focus on what our students have been doing during the first three weeks of our 1:1 rollout program.

Because of the new software and the new server, our students have been turning work in digitally to teachers. The teachers have been giving feedback on student work digitally from highlights to recording their comments in Garageband and placing them on the student work. The teachers have then been returning work to the kids digitally.

Language teachers have kids learning beginning Mandarin and all of a sudden saying things like “I like apples” is an interesting statement and the kids are engaged. Why? Because technology has increased engagement across the board.

Science teachers have students creating talking worksheets for vocabulary and give them the option to design a product which displays their knowledge about Biospheres. This designing a product was an OPTION for the students. Guess what? Over 80% of the class took their teacher up on the offer even though the technology component didn’t impact their grade. Cassie has only had her computer for three weeks and look what she was able to do…

I’m hoping that the conversation around “watching” students will be short tomorrow because I have lots to celebrate on behalf of my students and teachers!

Leave your comments here for Cassie and I will share them with her!

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While I was at the Apple Distinguished Educators training in November, we worked on our Wisdom Lost – Wisdom Found wiki and project in hopes that it carry through to our respective schools.  After sharing the project with my colleagues, we decided to model the Journeys Heritage Project after Wisdom-Lost, Wisdom-Found.  The Enduring Understanding for the unit tell you what we want students to take with them:

• There are many types of journeys
• Everything we do has an impact on ourselves and on our environment
• Our past shapes our present and our future
• Humans continually seek knowledge

The Journeys unit wrapped up last week with a culminating project about each student’s heritage. Each and every student used iMovie to create a digital story about their heritage and discussed and learned more about their family, environment, nationality and ethnicity. Over and over again, students made connections that ran deep into their heritage. They were insightful young adults and definitely are making their first steps towards becoming high school students. It always seems to happen around January and this project is proof of their growth throughout this unit of study. Thanks to Ms Muench, Dr. Brown, Mr. Small and Mr. Gilli for organizing this project with the students and for being committed to teaching the technology skills to support the student learning.

I hope you enjoy Tracy’s example!

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I am constantly amazed by the students in our schools.  We’ve all heard the age old adage, “If you give an inch, they’ll take a mile…”  Well, we have our 8th graders an inch and many of them took it the mile.  Over the past month, students have been creating their own Environmental NGO.  The students did a GREAT job of honoring our host country of China and focused their NGOs on Air Pollution, Deforestation, Desertification, Energy, Waste and Water Pollution.

One hundred and fifty students paired up and worked collaboratively across two teams.  I created a wiki page for them that had the requirements of the project and I provided them with several screencasts showing how to link to pages outside and inside the wiki, create a table of contents, and create RSS feeds.  They just needed the tools though… the brains, the meat of the project had to come from them!  I gave them the inch and they took the mile!!!

Here’s an example of a pretty darn good wiki that one of my groups created… and a video that another group created.  I’m motivated!  Great work 8th graders!

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