Hold My Chalk

Many of you probably have you favorite brainstorming activities that you do with your classes.  Some of you probably use your favorite IWB to get the job done and might even share the ideas between class periods by allowing them to view the pages from the previous group. Often times seeing someone else's work triggers more ideas. When the class period is over, the opportunity to share those ideas ends in most classes. It doesn't have to end, in fact there are many ways for the brainstorming to continue well into the next day or week if you want it to. The easiest way is to create a Google Doc and share it with all of your students.   When you share the document you have several options. What you will need to do is share it so that everyone in the group has editing privileges. In our district all students 5-12 have a Google account through the school, so everything is kept within the virtual walls of the school. The great thing about using a Google doc for this is the ability ...

This is approximately seven hundred of the iPads involved in the thousand iPad project.  Each pallet contains twenty-seven boxes and each box contains ten iPads.  Before anyone tackles a mountain like this there are certain issues to keep  in mind.  The first issue: How are you going to manage all of these pieces of equipment? This is a serious consideration.  Our first thought was to put this in the library system and check them out like books.  So time to dive into the library catalog system and find the best approach.  Fire up one of the computers and "Houston, we have a problem!"  The library server is offline.  Not just offline, but no amount of resuscitation is going to bring it back online.  Not only that, but the software has not been updated since installation and is five versions old.   Next option? Time for some research.  Eventually we do find that our library catalog will be perfect if we add one componen...

Dream big if you are going to dream.  Well, the superintendent where I work did.  Last spring he decided after attending the National School Boards Association conference that our district would begin to move towards 1:1 with iPads. With board approval he then began taking steps toward making it happen. Over the next few (remember few is a relative term) posts I will begin to chronicle our journey to 1:1 with iPads. I will include what we did and also let you know if I would advise doing differently. The first step in the process was staffing. He created new position called the Director of Educational Technology. This job is not your typical IT position, in our case it oversees the IT guys and includes the educational side of technology which if we are all honest, most IT guys don't have the time to worry about. Along with that position some other staff were realigned to fill positions of Technology Integration Specialists (my new role).   As the only full time Tech. Inte...