Thoughtful Problem #11
Busy administrators and lay people (non-technically trained) usually prefer to read a 1-page summary of a technology report. If they have a special reason or interest, they may read the entire document. Your goal is to get them to read at least the 1-page summary. Our Thoughtful Problems have been designed to train you in the preparation of a logically-organized 1-page statement or explanation.
Choose a technology topic that interests you. Imagine that your superintendent has requested a report from you on this topic. In 3-5 paragraphs write a clear explanatory report. The report may concern a proposal for a new project, a progress report on a problem like poor network bandwidth, or a status report on a project like a one-to-one computer implementation or technology staff development program. The emphasis in this Thoughtful Problem is the clarity, explanation and persuasion that may be necessary for the report to be effective. Keep in mind that the report may be given to each school board director or to newspaper and television reporters.
Response
Classroom for the Future Grant
The Classroom for the Future Grant was awarded to Colonial School District on September 20th and is a landmark program in terms of both educational technology and large-scale high school reform and will become a model for other states. Pennsylvania will be the first state to combine “smart” classrooms and laptop computers in Math, English, Science and Social Studies classrooms with professional development for teachers. The Colonial School District has identified the Social Studies curriculum as our starting point and in year two and three of the grant we will expand the initiative as long as the state continues to fund the project.
Flip the Switch
On February 9, 2007 a “Flip the Switch” ceremony for state legislators, board members, faculty and media was held to kick off the installation of Classrooms for the Future. At this time, one mobile cart was deployed in a single Social Studies classroom in Plymouth Whitemarsh High School. In the days following “Flip the Switch”, five additional laptop carts containing over 140 laptops were deployed to five additional Social Studies classrooms in the high school.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) Implementation
Since the spring of 2005, Colonial School District has been planning to implement an in-house product that allows for self-contained real-time collaboration between staff and students. With the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or MOSS, in January, the district was able to begin to see these ideas realized. The District began planning a MOSS implementation in conjunction with Microsoft Educational Services and one of the premier MOSS vendors, NuSoft Technologies in Grand Rapids Michigan. Internally, a storyboard environment was built to allow Colonial to visualize our ideas. Since this storyboard, a phased plan was developed (plan is contained on the back page of this pamphlet) to allow us to successfully reach our Goals.
With our implementation, classroom teachers have a separate course web site for each section they teach. In each section, students are granted rights to the page automatically when it is provisioned. This allows enrollment to adjust automatically as students drop or add classes. This newest version of MOSS contains several technologies unavailable in previous versions. Most notably are the addition of Blogs and Wiki’s. Teachers then have the option of building these modules into their course site as they see fit. These modules are self contained in-house and access is only available to the students currently enrolled in the section.
Another option contained in this new release is the SharePoint Learning Kit or SLK. The SLK allows teachers to “assign” electronic documents to students using the course site. This module also supports the SCORM 2004 standard for interactive assignment distribution.
This product has currently been released to the six Classroom for the Future Grant recipients
for use with their classes.
The MOSS system has been christened “The Colonial HUB”.
2 comments:
I found your responses to be very concise and they would be useful for someone like the superintended or media outlet. They gave an overall gist of the the topic and explained some but not all at length the major points of the topic. None of the topics were written to technically and that the masses could read and understand each.
Your posts always give me a real-world-case learning opportunity. I don't know why your school district choose social studies classroom as the project's first users. Based on my schooling experience, in my country, I would think math and science teachers would most likely applause the computer program firstly. When I was a high school student, I only used computers as a drill/practice tool in the math and physics class. As far as social studies class, I spent most time on memorizing…. :-)
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