David will not be here for an hour. He is addressing the ISTE Leadership Symposium. Chris Lehmann, the principal of the Science Leadership Academy http://www.scienceleadership.org/ in Philadelphia addressed the group for about an hour. His school just finished its first year. Though it is a one-to-one laptop school, he stressed that technology must follow pedagogy.
He and his teachers blog. They do it to enhance transparency, to create community, to engage in their own professional development and to reflect. For months before the school opened the staff blogged to share ideas and get a better sense of what the school would be like. The values they came up with for the school are inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection. All the teachers use Understanding by Design for planning.
The room setup is not very friendly. There are Gateway computers on the tables for each participant. It's good for the people who didn't bring portable computers, but these are large units. I can hardly see the speaker over the top of the screens. I don't believe this is a good learning environment.
Second, as soon as the speaker says something, the typing begins and these people are great typers who are taking down every word. The click, click, click is very distracting. I think the tablet deals with both of these problems.
David Warlick has showed up. He has created a wiki, http://sidebarenvy.wikispaces.com/, for the seminar. You should look at the Nuggets section for some great Web 2.0 tools. Each participant's notes will be saved to the wiki and made available for all to read. I couldn't log in (couldn't remember my password) so I got behind. I can understand the frustration of teachers trying to follow our directions and get something going on their computer while the presentation marches on.
With http://hitchhikr.com/ a conference can be registered so you can find the blogs that have been created at a conference. If you can't attend a conference, you still can. Here's the link for the NECC http://hitchhikr.com/index.php?conf_id=215.
He shared several tools for inserting pictures, podcasts, RSS feeds, etc. into your blog. He covered a lot of material.
An important point he made was that when we teach literacy, we need to consider the importance of getting the attention of the reader. With all the information coming to people through the Internet, how do we get people's attention? This is why we need to teach students how to handle pictures, images, graphs, video, etc.
1 comment:
Thank you for sharing so much information. I feel like I'm at the conference. I valued the idea that the technology had to follow the pedagogy. Also, it was good to see that you have emphathy for teachers who are following when you make presentations!
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