A Visit with Steve...

Tonight Steve Langford shared his experience as the CIO of the Beaverton School District and his vision of creating a plan to provide equitable technology deployment and use in the district. It made me realize how fortunate I am to be working in West Linn-Wilsonville. We are a much smaller district--we have 13 schools and Beaverton has 50! That creates a huge challenge for Beaverton to provide equitable technology opportunities for all fifty schools.

Our district has used several bonds over the past ten years to fund major technology upgrades district wide. The technology department has developed a plan for our district in terms of both technology purchases and maintenance, but also staff development. This plan is supported periodically through our bond monies and then of course individual schools add to the technology of their building through other funding sources.

I can really appreciate the challenge that districts face in trying to ensure that all schools in their district have the technology they need and that all teachers receive the professional development necessary to integrate the technology appropriately. It is a huge challenge--but a very important one to attempt to resolve.

February 12, 2009

Website 201
Tonight we learned about websites. I got a chance to try to make one of my own using google site and weebly.com. I found them a bit challenging to create but was able to navigate through fairly well on my own. I feel good about the fact that I am becoming more comfortable working in these new programs.



Don Woodward came to share about designing websites. He had an excellent powerpoint that he used to demonstrate poor and high quality websites. I learned so much by looking at his weak and strong examples. He gave an excellent presentation that helped us see what needs to be considered when creating a website.

He reminded us to focus on Tips for Effective Communication:

• Prioritize
• Determine what visitors MUST find out at the site
• Keep it simple
• Keep it relevant to your target audience
• Make the message impossible to miss
• Effective use of typography

Don also introduced us to several really interesting websites and I have chosen to list a few here. They are:http://www.skillsone.com/ and http://www.hillmancurtis.com/ and http://www.secondstory.com/ We viewed them for their arrangement and also the information we can learn from them.

Don also took the time to include each of our website pages in his presentation. We were able to see what our school district's have done well in creating our websites, and what we might do to improve it. He gave me some great ideas about what to do to improve our page and I want to talk with our IT to see if the suggestions he made can be implemented. A huge improvement would be to limit the words and information on the front page and to include more visual images of our beautiful school, both inside and out. This was a really helpful session and I want to speak with staff about making some adjustments to their pages based on the information I learned tonight.

Thursday, Feb. 5th, 2009

This evening was a sort of potpourri of information and idea gathering. I was really intrigued by the use of clickers in the classroom and want to talk to our IT about investigating this opportunity. We are working with our staff around formative and summative assessment and the use of learning targets and so the idea of using clickers for immediate feedback interested me.

I was also excited about the opportunity that the new ItunesU provides for us in the educational field. I can't wait to go and show our teacher-librarian tomorrow morning.

I am very interested in several of the books and journals that Todd shared and am going to have our school invest in a few of them for myself and others to look at. We need to develop our understanding of the potential that educational technology has to offer us.

And finally, Paul had many important ideas to share and I look forward to thinking through the concepts he presented and the possibilities he gave us. This class really has me thinking...