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Designing for Depth: A Kick-Off to a Technology Planning Month for the Walden School

This presentation connects the growth of the social web, the benefits and challenges it poses to society, the need to develop critical thinking and deep learning, and some pedagogic approaches that support student buy-in for student-centered, guided inquiry with technology.  Most of the goo.gl links go to collaborative documents within our school's Google Apps domain and are not public. NOTE: This is a 13.5MB PDF - right-click and download, rather than attempting to open it.

Googling Towards ePortfolios: A blog post for Educational Collaborators

ePortfolios are a high-cost, high-risk, and high-return pattern to adopt.  Although the State of New Hampshire (ambitiously) required all public schools to adopt ePortfolios by a common deadline, not all schools were (or are) ready for that level of technology integration into instruction and assessment. This post considers “Google Apps for Education”  as an “intranet ecosystem” from which the patterns of ePortfolio adoption can emerge. See also this Youtube Video of a presentation I gave via GoToMeeting.

See also Googling Towards ePortfolios, slides from a presentation given at the Dynamic Landscapes conference sponsored by the Vermont School Library Association and VITA-Learn on May 10, 2012. Unlike the article above, this presentation focused more on the theory and practice of ePortfolios as a component of authentic assessment and student empowerment.

Brochure: Technology Integration Specialist Outreach

I used this brochure in encounter sessions with all faculty members at the start of the 2011-12 school year, articulating various ways we might work together, expectations, and recommended areas of focus.  The sessions were universally well-received.

Drupal + Moodle for Blended Social Learning: Presentation PDF from Western Massachusetts Drupalcamp

This presentation is intended as a discussion starter for the attendees at my presentation for January 22nd's Drupalcamp concerning the development of multiple Drupal intranets to serve the various requirements of LMS, LCMS, SLE and SN.

Student-Centered Distance Learning: Presentation PDF from Online Course

This introduction was developed for the NYU School of Continuing and Professional Studies as an introduction to faculty who would spend the next year in professional development to learn how make distance learning courses more student-centered.

Civil War Blended Learning Project: Springs School  Case Study (PDF / Web)

Two of the sites below require logins and are therefore shown in screenshots; the third, http://news.springsdistrict.org, does not (students logged in as civil war personas, so no personal data). Work samples:

2005 - 2009

Tech Scouts at Game Face Web Design: Students as IT Professionals

When my technology coordinator position at Taconic Hills was cut from the district budget five years ago, my Tech Scouts students expressed interest in forming a web development firm.  We created Beyond the Box (http://btheb.com) - focusing on creative sites and Moodle e-Learning courses. I decided to try the private sector, putting all attention on the web business, re-branding the company as Game Face Web Design, LLC (http://gamefacewebdesign.com), encouraging clients to hire students to sit on their side of the design and development table.

2003 - 2005

Technology Coordinator, Taconic Hills Central Schools

Info-Tech Titans: Tech Scouts / IT Department Newsletter

Tech Scouts interviewed teachers and technicians and were responsible for 80% of the content for our technology department newsletter.  We also used this as a vehicle for students to present their ideas about technology planning and integration to the technology planning committee, who did not feel comfortable having students at regular meetings, and to highlight the projects of teachers I worked with.

  • Spring 2004 issue (PDF) http://empowered-teacher.com/sites/default/files/info-tech-titans.pdf
    • Cover Page: Article Leads
    • Scouts Report: Student Technology Planning Input
    • Computing with Clusters: a teacher profile written by a Tech Scout, showcasing my "classroom cluster" initiative.
    • Other Teacher Projects: The Periodic Table project was a close collaboration with me. Wwritten up by Tech Scouts

Spanish Cultural Exchange Videoconference Project 

The Spanish Cultural Exchange Project began by identifying an international classroom partner, securing mini-grant funding, and connecting via videoconferences and forums. The first activity was teacher driven - creating webquest projects for partner comment. The second was student driven - making videos about life in their respective schools and communities, shared over videoconference for reactions.

"Beat Japan" Economic Simulation

Students took the role of auto company CEOs, applying investment strategies in competition with each other (and, to their increasing surprise, Japan, which played by very different rules). Every morning they would read a news blog, meet as teams, and take new actions; the teacher would respond by creating the next morning's news blog, and informing each team of its financial status.

Poetry Powerpoints

Students chose from among three poems, created Powerpoint presentations designed to accompany their interpreted readings, and performed the readings before the class (and videotaped).  This was the most popular technology integration project I supported while at Taconic Hills, and it was showcased by the superintendant to kick off the following conference day.

Principal's Technology Leadership Institute

I strongly believe that the principal is the lynchpin of school-based technology planning. This workshop was co-presented with QUESTAR, and presented to principals from multiple districts.  A follow-up workshop provided support for technology planning efforts in each of Taconic Hills' schools.  In my second year, I drew on these plans and relationships in coordinating the district's technology plan, with action plans from each grade and department.

  • Powerpoint Presentation: Day 1: Principal as lynchpin of school based tech planning (PDF)
  • Technology Plan: Developed over the year with all teacher teams, all schools  (PDF)

Blended Inservice: Differentiating Instruction with Technology

This 6-week course included in-person workshop meetings (collaboratively developed with NERIC's Kim Greiner and Mary Capobianco) and follow-ups using Blackboard, our district's first exploration of online professional development.  Every participant developed a project that included a focus on addressing multiple learning styles with multimedia. Other Blackboard courses included "Designing Websites with Dreamweaver" and "Student Multimedia Projects".

2001-2003

Computer Applications Teacher, Hudson Middle School

Computer Curriculum, Grades 7-8

Students met for 5-week rotations to learn basic computer applications (Microsoft Office & Mozilla). I strove to integrate applications as part of inquiry projects, and give students local experiences of empowerment through social publishing. The course was very popular with students, and discipline was rarely an issue. 

Biology Conference: Cellular Structure

The Biology teacher and I teamed up for this unit, with classes meeting alternately in the science lab and in the computer lab during free periods. Student teams began with pond cultures, identifying protists and keeping a journal of drawings, diagrams, and behaviors, using computer lab time to research the organisms and background information. The unit culminated in student teams presenting "findings" in the form of Powerpoint presentations for peer review.  Students would quiz presenters on the content of their presentations (making sure each student knew the content) and asking questions to extend thinking.

1998 - 2000

Technology Director, Poughkeepsie City School District

1:1 Initiative: Authentic Science Research

This pilot, with grant funding from IBM, placed a cart of wireless internet laptops in the hands of upperclassmen who performed authentic science research as virtual lab assistants to university professors they cultivated individually as mentors.  I played a major role in helping the district adopt this initiative, training faculty to train students to use the laptops.

Minigrant Conference

This was the first major initiative as Technology Director.  As part of our initiative to link technology projects to state standards, I developed a linked competitive RFP and project development in-service course, using district teachers and BOCES instructors to run the sessions.  35 participating teachers developed standards-linked projects, and 10 submitted qualifying projects for funding and implementation support. An all-day conference gave each teaching team 30 minutes for presentation and participant feedback.

Project Oaxaca

The Oaxaca Project is cultural exchange project between 4th grade students in Poughkeepsie, NY and the residents of San Agustin, a small village near Oaxaca.  After local news stories of a San Augustinian community in Poughkeepsie, our project design took advantage of community interest to secure a grant from IBM to send teachers and a computer (with dial-up Internet) to the Mexican town. A bulletin board sustained shared communication, and students collaborated on a website and a move about life in their school.

A Small School's Technology Planner

Initially created for Living Schoolbook Project partner schools at the Institute for Learning Technologies  when I served as K-12 projects coordinator, this served as my road map for work at Poughkeepsie and at Taconic Hills later. I have updated it slightly in moving it to The Empowered Teacher.

Technology Implementation Plan

A technology plan was in place when I joined Poughkeepsie, but without a mechanism to connect and coordinate goals with resources and timelines.  This "implementation plan" was an action plan, choosing and budgeting for a subset of goals.

1997-2005

Tech Scouts Program Implementations, 4 schools

Tech Scouts is a student tech support service learning program I created at Columbia Teachers College.  First run as a credit-bearing high school course for Central Park East Secondary School (flagship of the Center for Collaborative Education Schools Network), I also implemented this as a credit bearing course + club at Poughkeepsie High School and University Heights High School, and as club at Taconic Hills, where we also conducted community education classes (eBay for Grannies) and built a Linux Terminal Server Project lab for a local town (Clermont, NY).

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