Middle School Tech

Spring is here…

my son who is senior class president, valedictorian, and coaching spring soccer for two teams in the local recreation league (ably assisted in coaching by my younger son who is a freshman and learning to drive) needs help with finalizing the last of the plans for his senior class’ celebrations…

my dissertation is way over due (delays in the last year included 6 weeks recovering from a stroke, 8 weeks of an unresponsive chair who was replaced, and 4 weeks working to have reinstated my new chair after his unexplained removal by the university)…

my calendar is full of dots marking end of the year trips, doctors’ appointments, and meetings to help hire new technicians in our supervisory union…

Something(s) have to go off the plate… I resigned from the NELMS Board last week…

I am ending the blog for the summer with this post… as dissertation research proceeds, I will post interesting insights, but I need time away from this for now… enjoy the summer, and look for new posts in the fall!

I have been researching search engines lately… not asking “which is the best to use?” but rather “how do these things generate results?” (Yeah, I know, I gotta get a life…)

Anyways… researchers who are interested in the connections between words (and understanding connections between words is useful for those who are generating rapid and comprehensive search engine results) use a tool at Princeton called WordNet…

I can’t believe that any other thesaurus or “word wall” is more complete than this one… it ain’t fancy… white background… a few controls… and tons of words!

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

The Shift Happens videos have been linked here before, and have been shown at NELMS conferences…

In the time since I last posted about the videos and showed them at the AC in early April, several folks have reminded me that there are still more versions… here are other recent versions that are available on YouTube…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjKBsfk_O8c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqd×8

I know we are all looking for (and continued to be amazed by) free resources… recently I found these… some may be of interest to middle school friends…

The Library of Congress has a channel on YouTube…
http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress

Link Library of Open Access English Language Journals
http://lislinks.blogspot.com/

World Digital Library
http://www.wdl.org/en/

Classical Archives
http://www.classicalarchives.com/

LIFE photos
http://images.google.com/hosted/life

In Vermont, schools are drafting new technology plans… in Vermont we are also gathering resources for summer professional development projects… I am sure colleague throughout New England are doing the same things.

Several requests have arrived in my inbox lately asking which documents I would suggest technology planners look at when looking for guidance in setting curriculum goals, designing instruction, and recommending updates to policy and procedure documents.

Here is my list… looking forward to others suggesting theirs:

1) National Education Technology Standard for Students (NETS-S)- The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) “refreshed” the tech standards in 2007. The companion to NETS-S, the National Education Technology Standard for Teachers (NETS-T) is also helpful. These documents do give broad visions for using technology to support learning; I like that approach, but recently I have been creating a list of local indicators (what will it look like when we are achieving the standard in our school) which has been helpful in understanding the expectations in the standards and understanding what we need to do in our school to promote effective tech-rich learning and to support educators.
http://www.iste.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=NETS

2) 21St Century Skills- The partnership that is promoting this initiative has some excellent resources, and deciding exactly which to use can be a challenge. (I think an outstanding idea for an administrators’ retreat would be to “jigsaw” several of their reports. The essential document for those unfamiliar with the 21st Century Skills is the 2009 Definitions:
http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/documents/p21_framework_definitions_final_021009.pdf

Looking over the Reports on their resources page is also essential for a more complete understanding of the type of education being promoted by the partnership:
http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=82&Itemid=185

3) The Horizon Report- which was featured in an earlier post on this blog
http://www.nelms.org/blog/index.php?blog=2&s=Horizon&submit=Go

4) Web 2.0 Survey- Lightspeed Systems recently commissioned a survey looking at the issues surrounding web 2.0 in school districts around the US. The executive summary suggests the reasons why we want to move to include these technologies in our classrooms and the issues we will face when we do.
http://www.lightspeedsystems.com/about/NewsDetails.aspx?Teachers-Driving-Web-2.0-Use-in-Schools