A draft of a where we are at email I recently sent.
I am very happy to hear that we are going one to one in the Middle School next year. When you look at what the students are learning in their middle school technology classes and the commitment that the school has made towards providing human and hardware resources I think we have the potential to do a lot with technology at the MS level.
I have through the past years, mainly through twitter and blogs, let people know about the different technology related activities that were happening at SSIS. I believe that letting others know about this use enhances the reputation our school has. I have realized that I have never included administration in this so I have gone back to look at what I have sent out so, if you have time, you might be more aware of what we’ve done at SSIS with the use of technology.
The first person I highlighted externally was Justine. Although she is no longer here you can see the following on her blog:
- comments from teachers from other countries via #commentsforkids and twitter (Special comments)
- exploration of digital literacy with her posts on Facebook Privacy and Digital Identity One and Two
- a series of, self selected, reflections for her eportfolio that shows that she could embed pdf files and videos she created in other classes. She has a number of these I have selected one that has both a video and a pdf file embedded in the document.
- human rights presentation from Humanities Class
- blog post on a collaborative programming project that she took part in with a Middle School in Michigan
Another thing I have sent out is our work with Eportfolios. We have had two semesters of experimenting in using our blogs to create Eportfolios, as you can see here. Teachers have been having their classes add portfolio reflections, however, much of what was added was during ICT classes due to a lack of resources. Without adding a lot of teacher work, next year in a one to one netbook environment an ongoing comprehensive Eporfolio becomes very possible.
