Common Grounds

Each of the four groups presenting their “ideal classroom” expressed an interest in the following categories. Please feel free to add specific examples to your comments.

1. Student Access (Laptops or Desktops; Palm Pilots or Cell Phones…)
2. Assessment (Designing Instructional Programs around our students’ needs)
3. Distance Learning
4. Defining Perpherals (What they should be, where they would be stored, how they would be accessed).
5. Smart Boards and mimio-boards
6. Communications

We also spoke of the need to communicate what we are doing to the teachers we are representing as well as hear their suggestions.  Please suggest concepts you would like to get at with the faculty at large, and possibly suggest survey questions to tease out this information.

The crunch…

Dr. Snyder would like us to pursue the 5 year plan aggressively leading to the due date of the TOP proposals (the first week of December). We would like to begin seeing the manifestations of our efforts next fall. She stressed both the importance of adding technological hardware, and personnel to support it.

Our first exercise was to construct our ideal classroom (if money were not an object) and to discuss what the instructional implications of our hardware “wish list” would be. For example, if all of our students had laptops and we had wifi access in these classrooms, our teachers would not be so limited with the direction of their lessons. When teachable moments present themselves, new content and resources are never more than a few mouse clicks away. Students would not need to be given hardcopies of worksheets, as these could all be distributed and collected electronically.

Other districts technology plans and committee resources

I’ve placed a sample district technology plan from the Rush Henrietta school district in the shared G drive > Instructional Services > Office of Instruction > District Technology Committee.  As our committee progresses we will put any other files created/used by the committee into this folder. If you do not have access please email me here:  John Bullington