Technology Immersion Project for Students & Teachers

I was reading Want a successful laptop initiative? Better choose Mac laptops! from Wes Fryer's Moving at the Speed of Creativity blog. Now, first let me say that I am definitely an Apple Macintosh advocate. I have my own personal Macbook Pro and have used Macs for many years and enjoy the experience very much. I have a 1TB Time Capsule to back-up my Macbook Pro and both mine and my wife's school Macbook laptops as well as giving me 802.11n Wi-fi base station capability which is extremely fast..

Our school District, Hereford Independent School District, in Hereford, Texas gave all teachers new Apple Macbook laptops this summer. Obviously, I am pretty pleased with this decision. We have a phenomenal IT department, and IT Director, who are progressive, forward thinking and willing to try new things and new initiatives such as our "1 to 1 for Teachers" inititiative.

We do have access to the iLife suite and I am really looking forward to seeing more from the Apple Professional Development for Education in the future.

So, it was with pleasure that I read Wes' recent post about Technology Immersion for Schools and Teachers. Well, we are now immersing our teachers and I am hopeful that within the next couple of years, our high school and our school district as well will become totally immersed in technology and we will see a true "1 to 1 laptop initiative" for all students.

We do have some students this year who qualified based upon their family's status as migrant workers, to receive an Apple Macbook for each family. What a fantastic program, I hope that programs like this continue. I do have a few of those students in my classes this year. Actually in some classes I might even have 3 or more students with laptops. So, I have been actually encouraging my students to bring their laptops to class to work on The HSTE Project that my students are participating in.

I do have permission to use these student laptops in my classroom from our Superintendent, IT Director and our CT&E Director and High School Prinicipal. I have had all of my students sign our Acceptable Use of Computers and Networks Policy as well as a signed permission form signed by all of my student's parents. So, I think that I have all of the bases covered and the first two weeks of our HSTE Project has been fun for me and I think fun for my students as well.

I did read with interest about "Floydada High School was named an “Apple Distinguished School”. Floydada being not all that far from Hereford, a contingent from our school district, teachers, administrators and IT folks went to Flodada last spring and everything that I heard was positive about their school's experience with their 1 to 1 laptop iniative for their school.

I agree with Wes when he states:

The need for and positive impact of good, strong, visionary leadership in our schools is evident everywhere, and it is certainly clear to see in a success story like Floydada ISD.

I am fortunate to work in a school district that has this type of strong, visionary leadership.

Great article, great topic and great opportunites for teachers as well as students. That is my take on this blog post.

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Bell-Bounded Learning

Bell-Bounded Learning - Learning which takes place within the limits of a class period or a school day. Learning stops when students leave the confines of the classroom and they are no longer in an educational enviornment.

The definition of Bell-Bounded Learning above is one that I made up. Why? Because although I have diligently searched, I could find no other definition.

I first heard the term Bell-Bounded Learning at Edubloggercon "Live in San Antonio" at NECC 2008. I was attending a session called:

If the Leaders Don't Get It, It's Not Going To Happen - How can we best help school principals and superintendents move schools into the 21st century? What are their special needs and concerns? What are ways we should not approach training for these folks?

The session was large so we broke into some smaller groups to better facilitate discussion. Wes Fryer and Stephanie Sandifer were in my group and the term came up. I don't know who first said it but Wes talked about it and we all tried to get our heads around the concept. Later at the k12 Online Conference session facilitated by Wes, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Darren Kuropatwa live via UstreamTV from Canada, and others, Wes mentioned the term again and also talked about Unbounded Learning. You can see it in this UstreamTV feed of that session.

Obviously, Unbounded Learning is what we should strive for as teachers and we should not be Bell-Bounded Teachers.

I did find some interesting resources online on Unbounded learning that I will share:

Bounded and Unbounded Knowledge: Teaching and Learning in a Web 2 World. This article was written by Judy Nagy, Director DMO Program, Deakin Business School and Chris Bigum, Faculty of Education, Deakin Business School, Melbourne Australia.

Unbounded Learning is an international company. Their stated mission is to connect the virtual community between knowledge providers and seekers who are constantly on-the-go. We continue to architect and develop state-of-the-art technology that makes available knowledge and information on demand and by intelligent push to the users of average mobile devices.

Christopher Keesey posted this on his blog Blog 4 Learning on July 24, 2008 "Lively and Learning"

There are some more resources about Unbounded Learning out there and I will let those who choose to comment to the post add to this discussion.

I guess the key for us as educators is this. Are we going to break free from the traditional methods of teaching that we were taught by as 20th century learners, or are we going to accept the 21st century challenge to take a critical look at how we are teaching our students? Will we recognize that along with our students, we are learners as well learning right along with our students these new Web 2.0 tolls and technologies in able to bring them into the classroom?

I think that this year I will choose the latter. I am initiating a new project-based learning concept in my classroom called the HSTE Project. I have no idea what the final outcome will be at the end of the school year next June, but it is something that I want to try so as not to be a bell-bounded teacher, confined to a bell-bounded classroom with bell-bounded students!

Edublogging: My Favorites

Eduglog: An edublog is a blog written by someone with a stake in education. Examples might include blogs written by or for teachers, blogs maintained for the purpose of classroom instruction, or blogs written about educational policy. The collection of these blogs is called the edublogosphere by some, in keeping with the larger blogosphere, although that label is not necessarily universally agreed upon. Others refer to the community or collection of blogs and bloggers as the edusphere.

This is a post that I have been thinking about writing for some time now. It is really just an entry in which I want to chronicle some of my favorites in the Educational blogosphere. While I do not  now consider myself a newcomer to blogging anymore, there is still much that I want to learn in order for me to contribute more to the collective that is educational blogging.

I would like to put together a collection of Essential Edubloggers at some point to list who I read on an ongoing basis and who I think anyone would profit by reading their blogs. I think the best way to do this is to create a Wikipage to list who I read. Dr. Scott MclLeod's blog Dangerously Irrelevant  posted "Top 50 P-12 Edublogs - June 2008" and a subsequent post "Top 50? Edublogs? - Follow-up". While I believe that Scott has done an admirable job of rating many of the edubloggers into such a definitive list, my own list of Essential Bloggers will not attempt to rate, rather to list those that I have found useful on my journey.

Note:After writing this blog post I realized that everyone whom I have listed I got the opportunity to meet and get to know, very well in most cases at NECC 2008 in San Antonio, TX (Please read my earlier posts about NECC and Thoughts about NECC 2008). I was just amazed at "The Community of Edubloggers" that I got to meet and learn from, which is one of the many reasons I enjoy edublogging as much as I do.

I would be remiss if I didn't give a lot of credit to Vicki Davis and her Cool Cat Teacher Blog from whom I have learned much and have "borrowed" many ideas from. Her post, "Ten habits of bloggers that win!"is a must read, in my opinion. Vicki has a tremendous amount of helpful ideas on her blog, as well as many great tutorials she has contributed on the Atomic Learning website.  (If you don't have an account at Atomic Learning I would highly recommend that you do).  Vicki is also one of the nicest ladies I had the pleasure to meet at NECC 2008.

Darren Draper who blogs at Drape's Takes is really a nice guy I had the opportunity to meet at NECC 2008. Darren has worked on a series of articles on ethics and etiquette with respect to blogging and internet use, a very good series that everyone should read.

Wes Fryer and his blog Moving at the Speed of Creativity is one of the first blogs I check every days for updates.  Wes is probably one of the most prolific bloggers and always has interesting things to read about educational issues. Wes asked me to record the Ustream Feed of a session he presented at NECC 2008 about the K12 Online Conference 2008, The Magic of Digital: Collaborative Interaction in Teacher Professional Development.

Classrom 2.0 Ning reaches 10,00 members! July 24, 2008, Congratulations!
Steve Hargadonalways has some very interesting things to say on his blog. Steve created the Classroom 2.0 Ning which has recently added it's 10,000th member, Edublogger World and countless other great Ning sites. He also hosted Edubloggercon which I attended at NECC 2008 in San Antonio. Steve has created, in my opinion, some of the best Web 2.0 resources for educators.

Chris Lehmann who blogs at Practical Theoryis absolutely amazing. I recently wrote a blog post about Chris' post Effective School Technology Leadership. I ran across a podcast that Chris recorded at the Apple Learning Interchange about School 2.0 which is excellent.

Ewan Mcintosh from Edinburgh, Scotland who blogs at edu.blogs.com is probably the most eloquent bloggers out there. Ewan also has the best accent of all of the bloggers I have met. I also like that Ewan was suitably impressed with my one-month old grandson at the Bloggers' Cafe at NECC 2008 one afternoon!

Stephanie Sandifer who blogs at The Change Agency always has some interesting topics as well as a wonderful insight into educational issues. I met Stephanie at Edubloggercon 2008and immediately liked her. Stephanie presented "Marzano & Web 2.0" at NECC 2008 to an overflow crowd. She surprised me when she asked me share an example of my students work that I submitted to the Web 2.0 that Workscontest that won in the Cooperative Learning category!

While I realize that this list is not definitive, it is a compilation of who I enjoy reading the most. I will add to this list as this is a "work-in-progress" blog post. Please note that I chose to alphabetize these edubloggers rather than assign a numerical rank. Please, if I have not added your blog to this list please forgive me, but as I said in the introduction, this is meant to be a list of edubloggers that I read the most.

Web 2.0 = School 2.0

I was reading "The Invasion of Web 2.o" at the Classroom 2.0 Website and came across this slide. The commentary on the website doesn't describe "School 2.0" other than the reference in the slide but I like the sound of "Web 2.0 = School 2.0"  as a catch phrase.

I read Wes Fryer's Moving at the Speed of Creativity post on April 16th about "Here for the Learning Revolution" and that got me thinking.  If Wes can claim Here for the Learning Revolution for his yet unwritten book maybe I can do something with "Web 2.0 = School 2.0"

There is a contest described in Dr. Scott McLeod's Dangerously Irrevelant weblog concerning a button design "I'm Here for the Learning Revolution" to be given away at NECC in San Antonio, Texas.  I'm going by the way and I would like to "claim" at least one button for myself and one for my wife, a computer technology teacher, who is also eagerly looking forward to EduBloggerCon 2008 & Classroom 2.0 "Live", Saturday, June 28th.

So, for anyone out there I would like to claim the phrase "Web 2.0 = School 2.0".  I don't know what I will do with it yet and I would look forward to anyone who would care to comment on this idea.