TUFSD Blogs

Today I am sharing the concept of Web 2.0 and School 2.0 with our leadership team. This is a great opportunity to expand the discussions we have been having in our smaller groups. Ultimately, the discussions should move to the teachers in each school, gathering feedback from teachers and administrators while building awareness of the tools that are available. We are working on developing the guiding questions for those meetings, developing a consistency in our questions.

Today our technology planning subcommittee met to define the processes we will use for creating our long term technology plan. We agreed that this plan would not be framed by the expectations and guidelines associated with the the e-rate requirements and required by the state (though that would still be created and would be an outgrowth of our strategic plan). Rather, we determined that we would create a long range strategic plan, one which addresses the best uses and applications of technology for our students and teachers.

By the end of our two hour session, we agreed that to develop such a plan, we need to develop a common set of guided questions to be shared with the teachers in each school, thus beginning our discussions in a focused manner. Feedback from teachers and administrators in each building would then be used to uncover common threads district-wide and provide a focus, allowing us to develop a strategic, long term technology plan that ultimately provides teachers with the appropriate tools and resources to improve instruction and student achievement.

This Thursday (January 25, 2007), I will meet with the leadership team and introduce the Web 2.0/School 2.0 concept, and provide a brief overview of some of the new tools available to educators. I will ask for their support as we move forward, looking to gather input from each grade level to ensure the committee is well informed. By identifying areas ranging from causes of frustration and other roadblocks to best practices and powerfully successful technology implementations, the committee will develop a plan that channels appropriate technologies to strategic uses, providing solutions and stimulating improved student participation and achievement.

By J. Calvert

Teachers are not strangers to change, although in recent years our noble profession has tasted an unprecedented escalation of change. Our district is not alone; teachers everywhere say the same thing. The reality is, the rate of change is increasing for everyone. It is present in teaching as much as it is present in law enforcement, auto mechanics, or any other profession. It has been spurred forward by our increasingly connected world and the technologies that enable it. This is a bit overwhelming, especially when you consider that our current rate of change will be considered staid compared to what our students will experience.

Vygotsky wisely told us that a society is defined by the tools it uses. Indeed, new tools are responsible for the incredible shifts we are witnessing. Time magazine recognized this when it announced that the “Person of the Year” was us. The video sharing website YouTube, the social networking website MySpace, and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, all have something in common: the masses create the content. Regular people share their knowledge with other regular people. It is a simple paradigm, but when it is applied on a global scale the traditional avenues of information dissmination, such as newspapers and television, are supplanted. The “old media” outlets are painfully aware of this shift, as was reported on January 1^st of this year by The News Hour.

The repercussions have been huge. When the now famous “Mukaka” incident was published on YouTube, it cost George Allen a Senate seat. Wikipedia was the first encyclopedia world wide, online or in print, to reflect that Pluto was no longer a planet. I watched Saddam Hussein hang on YouTube, the very night the execution took place. However, the footage I saw on my laptop was different than what was shown on TV. The YouTube clip was captured by an Iraqi on his cell phone and then posted to the online site. The YouTube footage included the sectarian chants and audible chaos of the moment which belied the somber justice that the mass media was initially presenting to the public.

As we prepare to write our five-year technology plan, we must consider these changes. Knowledge is everywhere in our net enabled world.  It will be important for our students to know how to find what they need and digest it efficiently. This ubiquity of information will also assist teachers, as quality news programs like Nova, Frontline, and the News Hour, publish their content to the internet. Even MIT is participating in this shift. MIT’s OpenCourseWare website offers 1,600 courses for free to the public. These materials can be harnessed to augment classroom instruction, and in many cases, put the emphasis on student directed learning. Powerful tools are already changing our society, the trick for our committee will be to uncover how they can also meaningfully change education.