CUE Conference

I've been attending the CUE conference in Palm Springs the last couple of days and will be leaving exhausted, inspired, and ready to collaborate! We have a large group from the district attending and I can't wait to get together and share what we've learned.

Highlights -

• Hall Davidson - Discovery Education Speaker
  
• Vicki Davis - Differentiating Instruction
• Cheryl Fiello - Professional Development Training
• Scott Skidmore - Hot Potatoes
• Jon Leister - 21st Century Professional Development

There were many more and I will be adding more thoughts and notes at a later date!

EETT - Roll-out

We have started rolling out our laptop carts to our schools. We've delivered carts and training to two elementary schools and started on our first middle school last week. Each school has received 40 laptops, 1 server, 1 printer, and 1 router. We've worked through a few server glitches and this last roll-out is working extremely well. The elementary school training took place in each 4th and 5th grade classrooms. The middle school training is taking place in the library led by the library media teacher. The kids are so excited about the new equipment and extremely respectful.

The Genius of the Work-Around

Want to teach problem solving skills to our students? Put them in charge of our technology. Anyone who has been in charge of technology, even his or her own computer to some extent, understands the strategy of the work-around. If it doesn't work in one browser, try another. If something seems glitchy, turn your computer off and try again. There are millions of examples of work-arounds and what I've learned from the work-around is that there is always another solution. It may not solve the problem completely or be a long-term solution, but the key is to look for alternative solutions. In essence I've learned to look out of the box.

Example: Last night I was with a bunch of friends who decided to have a pizza and movie night. The movie was downloaded from Apple TV (Apple's best kept secret) and once the food was delivered we settled in to watch the movie. Of course, it didn't work. The movie showed up as a white screen with the timeline bar across the bottom, but no video.

The work-arounds:

• check to see if it's available through PPV (it wasn't)
• check to see if it's available through OnDemand - (it was) - however once we ordered it through "OnDemand" it started 20 minutes into the movie and only recorded 10 minutes of the entire movie. Grrrr.
• checked online to see if RedBox had the movie - (yes, but not anywhere close to us)
• checked to see if Blockbuster had the movie - (no all checked out)
  

Yes by this point we had eaten our pizza!

• restart the Apple TV device (movie worked like a charm)

Now my non-tech friends were AMAZED! They kept mentioning how "determined" we were to see the movie. (Just to add insult to injury, the movie was terrible.) We weren't determined, we were just exhausting all the options. It is the way we think. It is the way we want our students to think. Time to teach problem solving "work-arounds."

Starting the Grant

We had our first Coach/Mentor training on Tuesday. Our 16 coach/mentors were educated and entertained by the LACOE Multimedia Services team as well as TechEd Services. Gina Armenta-Shin is the project coordinator for the grant and did a wonderful job of organizing everything and giving us an overview of the project. We are working on getting our EETT Moodle site updated and will be posting all important documents and updates there. We met with the MIS department today to discuss the roll-outs of the carts and they are confident that we can get everything rolled out in the next 4-5 weeks! It is so exciting. I know the teachers at each site are getting anxious to get their hands on those machines and it looks like it's actually going to happen.

Tech Conferences

I am currently attending the California League of Middle Schools /Computer Using Educators conference in Monterey, CA. I've attended a number of fascinating sessions from data-driven decision making to converting a Wii remote to an interactive whiteboard. (Can't wait to try the last one out!)
Of course, the available technology was not nearly as advanced as the sessions and while wireless was sometimes available, it was down more than it was up and not available at all in over half of my sessions. I find this VERY frustrating when I'm at a technology conference, and I couldn't help but find a parallel to how our kids feel in our school settings. They are wired constantly via phone, iPod, and portable game devices, so why are we keeping them from using these resources. People have told me at many different conferences that they have turned the wireless access off because they want us to listen to the presenter. I'm not wired to just sit and listen. I need to synthesize what I'm learning and post to Twitter or my blog or take notes for myself in Google Docs. Why squeeze me into a four walled box when I'm just not wired that way? Well, the real problem is we're doing the same thing with kids - and considering that our "technology" savvy events aren't technologically enlightened, how can we expect it to trickle down into our schools?

Wiki Updates

We've been working diligently on updating our wiki. We have added a number of video tutorials (created by Kim Ellis of AHS) on Aeries ABI and Jeanne's been adding lots of FAQs on the elementary report cards and teacher web pages. We are also adding to the links portion of the site, but I'm not sure it's a very user-friendly layout. Any suggestions on ways to organize great online resources?

Aeries Resources

I have created an introduction video on setting up your Aeries Gradebook. You can view it below. We've also found another school district that has posted Aeries ABI tutorial videos. You can find those videos here.