Lauren’s Blog

Finished my final paper which was a great reflective process. So much of what I have read and been asked to do in this course has been excellent. It has forced me to reflect on my role regarding tech intergration and how so much can be improved at our school. I came away with some concrete goals that will be translated to action in the 2009-10 school year. Being forced to look at the big picture and then evaluate where the biggest gains need to be made was essential.

The only part of the course that befuddled and frustrated me was designing my own game on Scratch. I found the practice excercise easy and almost fun. However, I kept putting off doing the actual game. I must have started four different ideas and they all were terrible. I just don’t have that creative visual mind, and to be honest, didn’t feel motivated by the task since in my role there is little to no use for games of the caliber I’d be able to create. So, I did a one panel “Touch the Even Numbers” game for my son, and called it quits.

Minor frustration aside, I go away with a much deeper respect for game programmers and a lot more work to do at my school! Thanks everyone.

And Craig, I finally SAW the HTML tab to embed. DUH. So I included the Scratch practice excersice here as well.

I had very mixed feelings about the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) blocking social networking sites. I did a little research, and it looks like it never got past the bill stage. Our school has wireless access everywhere in the high school and students are permitted their own laptops. We are not yet a 1:1 school, but will be by the 2010-11 school year. We do not block Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and so forth. Several teachers have asked us to do so, but our party line has been that we need to teach kids responsible use rather than just blocking it out.
At the moment, we are developing a required course for our grade 9 students which includes a unit on Digital Citizenship. Understanding copyright issues and using Creative Commons are part of the course goals. While reading this, I thought that writing questions for our own Cyber Awareness survey for the beginning of the digital citizenship unit we be a good idea. We’d have baseline data and misinterpretations at our hands. It could be useful in evaluating the effectiveness of our interventions and lessons. We recently did an alcohol and tobacco survey which provided us with a wealth of information about our students habits and where the big “jump” in risk behaviors happens. We have used this data to help redesign some of our health programs.
Teaching students about the accountability piece of what they put online will be a big discussion point for our 9th graders, but needs to permeate the school more. Many of the issues brought to school by parents or other students have to do with posting photos of their friends doing something they shouldn’t be doing. The reality of everyone having a camera in their pocket at all times is a frightening thing for young people these days. Glad that wasn’t the case when I was in HS or university. 
One of the things I found interesting was other schools’ policies on student photos online. We do not have a policy about student photos on our website. We never identify students by name, but it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out a lot about a kid by looking through our site carefully. I wonder if this is something I should bring up at an admin meeting. It would certainly change the nature of our website! http://www.sas.edu.sg/hs/

The readings and presentation for this week are so timely for our school’s next phase in tech integration. We are regularly working with tech educators as well as relying on our in house tech trailblazers to lead us into the 2.0 world.

I “wrote” a lot of notes (digital stickies) in  the margins while reading Chapter 3. One of the biggest obstacles for some of our late adapters definitely revolves around open source and the belief that “free means junk” or there is ”no free lunch.” When I think about Firefox and how much faster and more secure it is, as well as the immediacy of bug fixes and plug-ins, I wonder how people could be wary.

Some of our teachers are using all sorts of 2.0 tools to enhance the learning in their classrooms. For example, a chemistry teacher is creating vodcasts of himself solving equations. Students then have the ability to review the process at home, at their own pace, with their own instructors explanations. Wikis are used regularly in numerous courses at our school.  Many of our teachers used Google Earth in conjunction with audio and video to create podcast downloads for their interim semester trips. Essentially, personalized guided tours of the trip’s itinerary again with the instructor’s voice. One of our teachers gives project feedback in the form of short videos he posts to YouTube. He still uses a written rubric, but expands on the feeback through his videos. This is similar to what the article “Read Better Learning with Sites and Sounds” was discussing.  It is wonderful to have evidence that these collaboration tools actually improve understanding and aren’t just “bells and whistles.”

Social bookmarking is definitely an underutilized tool at our school. Teachers could easily share information by department or interests, and the same could be done with students. There are advantages for our whole school community. Imagine the power of having a parent/school site where articles or sites that support the school’s mission/vision can be shared with everyone?

One thing I am interested in learning more about is Moodle and how it could be used. There seem to be so many software tools for math and science, but content specific ones for English or history seem hard to find. Any thoughts on that?

More soon.

These readings and presentations were mostly review for me, though a few things stood out as new like Moore’s Law and the term “wordlength.” While I have a general understanding of the world of hardware and software, I certainly wouldn’t call myself fluent. I experience the fear of new processes or programs that I imagine many of us who are not digital natives feel. As soon as master a program or understand a new app - it becomes old news.

Our school has 3800 students PreSchool – Grade 12. We have 25 fixed labs of 24 computers each, and 11 mobile labs. In addition, our HS is wireless and students are free to bring their own computers to school. We do not have a 1:1 program, but have set the 2010-11 school year as our goal for each HS student to have their own laptop. Our IT department maintains our hardware, complemented by an instructional IT coordinator at each of the schools (primary, intermediate, middle and high). We use Blackbaud for all of our bio, financial and development data. The Blackbaud bio data is manually transferred to Powerschool at the beginning of each semester and weekly from then on. While we could use Blackbaud as our student management system, we had some bad experiences with the product in its early versions. We adopted Powerschool five years ago and maintain live, active parent/student accessible gradebooks for middle and high school. In addition, HS and MS teachers and students rely heavily on the Blackboard class management system for homework posting, digital drop boxes, voice tools, and so forth.

Our software needs are varied given the nature of our school. System wide we use Microsoft Office 2007 and use Outlook for our day to day administrative work. We install Adobe Photoshop schoolwide, as well as many of the free Google apps. Individual teachers or departments can request the purchase of software for instruction. For example our HS science department regularly uses the Vernier probeware/software system. As more and more free apps are available, we are seeing students and teachers branch out to find tools that work best for what they are doing in their classes.

There are of course questions about control of the software on the school owned hardware. Last week, our system was infected by the W32.Silly!gen worm and we had to clean house. The truth is as we move forward, a control battle will be something we are bound to lose. What we need to do is prepare our students and teachers to troubleshoot these sorts of issues on their own, and to do everything they can to avoid them.

This is my first ever blog posting. When I took the “Skills Assessment Survey” I felt confident that I was familiar with a lot of it. However, the WordPress interface is new and some of the tools quite unfamiliar.

I work at Singapore American School and while in many ways we are ahead of the tech wave, in some we are far behind it. I see how useful blogs might be for students and teachers and know many of our faculty members use them regularly already. I would like to work on getting our admin team blogging, I think that would lead to a much stronger sense of faith in our moves forward in technology. The presentations on the changing nature of tech and blogging were good reminders about where we are going, what we are doing.

It was really exciting to read in Web 2.0, New Tools, New Schools Chapter 2 a quote by Jeff Utecht. In November, I participated in the EARCOS Administrators’ Conference in Borneo where Jeff Utecht presented many sessions, as did my newest hero Alan November. Our high school division is one year away from a 1:1 laptop implementation, and I expect the things I learn in this course will be very helpful. More than anything, I would like to expand my IT vocabulary and improve my skills in collaborative technologies.

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