August 21, 2009

Not a lot to report on this front, except...the very exciting news, that after four months of asking nicely, Nancy and I were able to secure the donation of 5 (slightly used) smartboards from The School at Columbia to Quest to Learn. YAY!!!! As soon as I find out the exact models, Amy will work on drafting installation guidelines. I will work with Don Buckley (dir. of tech at columbia) on getting them picked up.

Also, the tech handbook is about done. Per Hsing and Robert's suggestions, we are going to roll parts of it into the student/parent handbook.

Teacher laptops should be arriving soon, and student tech orders went in this week.

August 14, 2009

A few significant updates to report:

1. The technology portion of studio q last week went very well. We introduced the technology philosophy, went over some expectations about the use of technology in meetings and school events, and Al gave a nice overview of google docs and some other interesting tools. Teachers began to work on domain websites, that work should continue over the next few weeks. Also, the tech integration portions of curriculum development this week were productive. As of now it looks like a variety of tools will be implemented during the first trimester, some of them are: screencasts, podcasts, imovie, google docs and sites.

2. Technology equipment and supplies were ordered yesterday by Lassina through Famis. Teacher laptops were ordered last week and should arrive soon.

3. All the teachers have been set up with email and communication with the teachers should now go through the q2l.org domain. The convention is first initiallast name@q2l.org.

4. I met with Amy yesterday to begin work on the customization of Oracle. We worked through curriculum, dimensions and competencies. There are some next steps associated with this. We will need to decide on the values associated with the levels of the rubric in order to create the "progress bar" we had discussed. This will need to be done in the next couple of weeks, perhaps when Robert is back from vacation we can add it to an agenda.

5. I am currently working on putting the Technology Handbook together and will send a draft out this week. I am also pulling bits of it for the technology portion of the website and should be able to send that out later today.

Next Steps:

1. Schedule a time to talk about numeric value of rubric levels (I will explain)
2. Schedule a call with Flat Toads to check in on progress.

Technology Update

Hi All -

There is a lot to report on the technology front, and I apologize for my lack of postings. Please read on for some updates:

1. Lassina - He started on July 15th. He's got a ton of energy and great ideas. Currently he is working out of the school and IoP. He has been assisting at Mobile Quest, and that seems to be going well. Coming up, he will be working with Leah on getting Email and GoogleApps set up for Quest, with Aaron to get ATS set up, and with Katie and Radhika on the website. He will be attending the retreat next week too.

2. Technology and Professional Development - We have set aside some time during the first week of PD to give some direct instruction on technology at Quest. Hopefully we will have the laptops for the teachers by then, but it is likely we will not, in which case we may consider moving this piece of PD until later on in August. New Visions has also offered PD services around technology and targeted needs.

3. Oracle Student Learning - Amy is working on populating our instance of Oracle with New York State Standards and Quest competencies. I will be working with her over the next two weeks to start to put our curricular framework in as well as our rubric systems. Flat toads has also worked up a contigency plan in case Oracle does not work out. The plan includes looking towards some open source student information systems and building some pieces from filemaker. Lassina will be working soon with Leah and Arielle to start to gather data that has been collected and create something meaningful that will plug into Oracle or anything else we use.

4. Ordering, etc. - Last Tuesday we had a long technology meeting attended by Katie, me, Amy, Aaron, Leah, Al and a NV rep and DOE rep. It was a very productive meeting and a bulk of the time was spent discussing technology equipment, what we want and how to get it. Some important decisions were made:

• We will be ordering Netbooks (1 to 1 ratio). For those unfamilar, they are smaller computers that are appx 400.00 each and provide easy web browsing and simple text edit.
• We will be ordering a cart of Macbooks for the heavier technology lifting.
• We will be looking into a special offer for smartboards - 2 for 1! and also looking into purchasing mimio's with projectors for meeting rooms and maybe a classroom.
• We will be ordering some widescreen tv's and katie is talking to some people about getting ps3's donated so we will be able to use little big planet.
• Amy is working on a list of peripherals including things such as headphones, carts, cameras, etc.
• Al provided a list of software for the image and Amy is cross checking with what the DOE provides.

Amy is putting the specs together and will send them to Aaron. Aaron would like to get ordering done ASAP.

5. We have begun discussing what the tech dept at quest will look like. Al and Lassina had some great ideas around using google apps to set up a help desk system. Al and Arana have started to put together the technology handbook and an acceptable use policy. Al will begin to think about a plan for laptop roll out.

6. Arana has been working on draft of technology standards for teachers by the end of their third year (pasted below) at Quest. These will need to be broken down year by year to fit with the Studio Q plan.

Technology Standards for Teachers

(Adapted from The ISTE National Technology Standards and Performance Indicators for Teachers)

Effective teachers model and apply the following standards as they design, implement and assess learning experiences to engage students and improve learning at Quest to Learn.

Teachers promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness.

Teachers engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources.

Teachers promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students’ conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes.

Teachers model collaborative knowledge construction by engaging in learning with students, colleagues, and others in face-to-face and virtual environments.

Teachers design relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity.

Teachers develop technology-enriched learning environments that enable all students to pursue their individual curiosities and become active participants in setting their own educational goals, managing their own learning, and assessing their own progress.

Teachers customize and personalize learning activities to address students’ diverse learning styles, working strategies, and abilities using digital tools and resources.

Teachers demonstrate fluency in technology systems and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations.

Teachers collaborate with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation.

Teachers communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using a variety of digital-age media and formats.

Teachers model and facilitate effective use of current and emerging digital tools to locate, analyze, evaluate, and use information resources to support research and learning.

Teachers promote and model digital etiquette and responsible social interactions related to the use of technology and information.

Teachers advocate, model, and teach safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources.

Teachers develop and model cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with colleagues and students of other cultures using digital-age communication and collaboration tools.

Teachers address the diverse needs of all learners by using learner-centered strategies and providing equitable access to appropriate digital tools and resources.

Teachers participate in local and global learning communities to explore creative applications of technology to improve student learning

Teachers exhibit leadership by demonstrating a vision of technology infusion, participating in shared decision making and community building, and developing the leadership and technology skills of others

Teachers evaluate and reflect on current research and professional practice on a regular basis to make effective use of existing and emerging digital tools and resources in support of student learning

June 12, 2009

Amy, Lassina and Aaron went on the facilities walkthrough of the new space on Tuesday. Please see Aaron's notes on this - seems Amy thinks it looks good and will support our infrastructure, which is great.

As mentioned in the curriculum blog, one charge of the technology group next year will be to evaluate the use of SPACE and Oracle. Arana will lead this and hopes to enlist Al in the afterschool space.

We will need to meet soon to review the budget against what Flat Toads had specified, we will need to get stuff ordered soon.

Shawn has set up an asset management database. We will need to talk about what kind of assets we would like to track. Could be anything from books to straight technologies. I will train Lassina in the tool as soon as he officially comes on board.

May 29, 2009

Not too much new to report here.

Since we have an official site (yay!) flat toads will be able to get started with some more on the ground planning and development. There will be a walk through of the space on Tuesday and I will meet with Flat Toads before that to get specifics on what kind of information they need from an initial walk through.

Al has joined at smallab for the past two sessions. He spent most of the first observing, participated in the second and will help me lead the third. He's been great with the kids and is really interested in the smallab system.

May 22, 2009

This week we had a call with Arthur VanderVeen from the DOE. He has been managing the ed tech department within the DOE for about 8 weeks. The call was exploratory and thorough. Aaron gave Arthur an overview of Quest, it's mission and central ideas. Arthur seemed very interested in our model. The call was less about the nuts and bolts of technology which I actually found encouraging. He seemed to really understand the use of truly integrated technology and the way that its authentic integration can support learning. As Aaron mentioned in his update email, he is interested in getting us involved in his e-portfolio work and was particularly interested in Oracle. Amy has followed up with him, sending him information on the system. Arthur felt we had a strong team with clear visions and interesting partners. He said he would help to secure appropriate technology for us and would like us to stay in touch and keep him in hte loop.

On another note, Amy and I developed a due date of June 8th where we will be given an instance of Oracle to play with. Rebecca and I will be traveling to Chicago on June 10th to work on developing SPACE/DICE to meet our needs.

TO DO:

It will be necessary soon to set up a meeting with Flat Toads, Lassina and Al to discuss many things.....base image, software, budget for peripherals, etc.

Amy will need to be included on any walkthroughs of M047 so she can begin to build out our plan. It may be beneficial to invite Lassina to that as well.

May 15, 2009

I spoke with Flat Toads this week to update them on our assessment ideas. Amy seemed to think the idea for progress bars within the rubric was doable within Oracle and she is looking into that. Also, I have asked Shawn to set up a simple asset management tool for us to start to use. It occured to me when we were given technology from the DOE after the Cisco event that it might make sense for us to start to track technology assets belonging to the school. Once that is up and running, Amy will host it externally for us until we can move it over to the Quest.

Leah has set up email accounts for Rebecca and I so that we can test run q2l.org. We had some discussions about what email for the teachers will look like and we thought perhaps we can set up their doe accounts to forward to gmail so that we can all me in the google environment for file sharing, google docs, google talk etc.

Lassina has been hired and he is eager to begin to work on the tech buildout. He has experience with this and is willing to donate some time, so we can talk about how to use his expertise. Also, some of his responsibilities at RGA are around data management of DOE systems, so I'd like to find out what he is capable of as we continue to look at the positions and staffing. I think he may be able to help out.

Coming up, this Friday we are meeting with Arthur V. at the DOE to discuss our vision and Quest. I'll update that next week.

technology update

hi all,

sorry for the lack of reports, been away, but now i'm back. flat toads has been working on our assessment framework. robert recently sent amy documents and she is working in the demo instance of oracle to get it up and running for us to play with.

aaron, leah and i went to a doe/cisco workshop which focused on using technology to communicate our vision to outside observers. we are pretty well versed in how to do this, so it wasn't the best use of time. although, we did create a fun podcast that i will share at our meeting. we also recieved and ipod touch, digital camera and flip camera for the school. yay! our first few pieces of technology.

we will be meeting next friday with art vanderveen at the doe to discuss technology related items, katie has more information about this meeting.

lastly, i will be talking to shawn and ryan this week to help them understand the assessment structure and look at some things they have started to put together.

-arana

Upon meeting with Amy, we learned that SPACE and L360 should be able to integrate well. We decided that SPACE would be used in the afterschool/wellness domain and be connected to Being Me. The wellness teacher/afterschool coordinator, with Arana and Rebecca will assess its' capacity to integrate with the curriculum development process and assessment models at Quest.
Arana and Rebecca will use L360 in a similar manner and assess the same things. We will decide how and what to move forward with at the end of the first year.

Amy will be developing an instance of L360 for us to run some curriculum through. Once that is up will get a better idea of what type of assessments and reports can be produced on a regular basis. That will inform our reporting process.

Otherwise, nothing new to report. Still looking at how to fund laptops, I assume we will know more once we know our budget.

April 10, 2009

Katie posted notes from the most recent conference call with Flat Toads. As a result of the call, we will do some work on defining assessment so they have a better idea of what we will need.

I am waiting to hear back from Amy regarding whether or not she is able to meet on April 17th about SPACE/Oracle.

We have a tentative call scheduled for Thursday, April 16th at 3pm. If folks feel that is a necessary call I will put together an agenda and distribute.

April 3, 2009

Not much new to report. Flat Toads and Q2L had a conference call yesterday to go over the budget and timeline. Notes from that meeting will be posted soon.

Moodle Deep Dive

Today Leah, Amy and I met with Kathy at DIIT to do a "moodle deep dive". It ended up being more of a show and tell where Amy demonstrated some of Oracle Student Learning's capabilities. Amy will be at the assessment meeting on Monday to show the whole team the tool, and Leah will attend so she can frame it within the DIIT.

The meeting went well, Kathy and Oren (from IT Security) were very excited by Oracle's product. However, it doesn't fit within their offerings of what they are giving 21st century demonstration schools, which rasied a little concern. If the assessment team likes the capabilities of Oracle Student Learning we may need to place the product within the needs of the assessment team and use it to help drive our research around assessment. Leah will be able to explain more of this on Monday.

We didn't get to Moodle, but apparantly, it was decided that the demonstration schools will be using Moodle, so we may need to put an instance of it together and use it sparingly (or a lot if people like it) for course management, as well.

March 13th Update

Not much new to report here. Aaron and I went to Cisco yesterday to participate in a telepresence session with John Beherns from their education and assessment department. It was interesting, but focused more on DOE projects. This week, Rebecca and I will meet with Amy to talk about ways to build and share curriculum via technology.

February 27th update

This week we met with DIIT to get a better understanding of the services we will be provided with. The gave us a general understanding and we identified some next steps. We will be doing a "deep dive" into the Moodle environment that DIIT provided for ischool and developing needs around an online environment. Along with the technology work group, Amy will attend this meeting with someone from Oracle.

Amy was in contact with the Apple rep and he provided her with an image to look through based on what apple has provided other DOE schools. She is reviewing that.

Flat toads has finished work on the technology implementation plan and will be submitting that to Katie this week.

February 13th update

This week's progress:

Arana, Robert, Leah, Hsing and Aaron visited ischool on Tuesday. The visit was good, the school was interesting. Couple of take aways for us:

• we talked with the principal about pd's. much of thier pd focused around training teachers to use moodle. the fact that it requires so much training is interesting and should raise the question of its ease of use and whether we may be able to find something that's a little easier to use.
• ischool upon hiring didn't screen for tech savvyness but required a basic tech understanding. upon reflection they think this may have been a mistake.
  
• smartboards were donated by smart technologies. kathy from diit facilatated this.
• they have a full time technician who they say is invaluable to the operation of the school.
• they also have a tech integrator on staff whose position is similar to the one we have envisioned within mission lab.

Arana, Amy, Ryan and Shawn met to discuss the timeline flat toads is due to deliver. That will be coming to us sometime next week. Also, we discussed setting up a regular meeting. The day/time is still being decided.

Arana, Aaron and Amy met with the DOE's Apple rep and Kathy from DIIT today. The name of our apple rep is bob johnson. he seemed really great and was very interested in quest to learn's pedagogy and vision. he is unable to offer us any hardware, which was not surprising. he did, however, go through the bundle of stuff he can provide us and it is good. he is able to put together a pretty solid base image for us including free site licenses for the iwork suite, comic life and a few other things. We also discussed a timeline for ordering and ways to get machines into faculty hands first. Some things that he was able to offer us were:

• apple has a huge pd initiative. they have access to the ADE network and can bring in key individuals to provide pd to our teachers around particular programs and the mac operating system. one ADE in particular, marco torres, was mentioned. i actually know him, he's in la and would be great for a pd session which apple can sponsor. i'm going to try to catch up with him for a conversation while i'm in la next week.
• there was some talk about students creating applications for the iphone. if that were to be done, it would fit well for the boss level during the first trimester of 7th grade, technological systems, and apple could help us with development and software.
• itunes u. bob may be able to hook us up with people that work on itunes u so that we can have our own space and offer courses or interactive lectures through them.
• mobile me accounts for our kids
• they would like ot make us an featured school and help us apply to be an apple distinguished school. we missed the deadline this year, but they can facilitate the application process for next year.
• they have a lot of access to grant writers and will put us in touch with them so that they may help us find monies to fund the tech program.

With Kathy, we talked about strategy for moving forward. Amy also told Kathy about Oracle and L360 and there might be some interesting synergies there, Amy is going to move forward with Kathy on that front.

Next Steps:

we have a tentatively scheduled meeting with Kathy and her team on Thursday, February 26th at 9AM. Amy will represent Flat Toads at the meeting.
we will start to learn a little more about how schools finance laptop programs. apparantly when bundled, macbooks are nearly the same price as the dells that the district supplies, we will just want more than the allotted, but there is precedent and we should look around.
Once we schedule the first of the weekly meetings with flat toads we will go through their timeline and assign tasks to different members of the technology team. this meeting will likely take place the week after next.

February 6th update

This week Aaron, Leah and Arana visited The School at Columbia University and met with Andrew Gardner from their technology team. Andrew provided us with some good examples of technology integration. We will be visiting ischool on Tuesday and Packer Collegiate in a couple of weeks. At this point, we are gathering ideas. We will eventually share the ideas with flat toads with the hopes they will be able to help us create solutions that will work for us.

We have begun to formally work with flat toads this week and we will be outlining a timeline and priority of tasks for them to start their work with us.

January 30th update

We met with Flat Toads yesterday. They will be interfacing between the DOE and our group so that we come up with solutions that hold true to the vision of Quest to Learn. We will have more to report once we provide some information to Amy and Amy and her team get back to us with some timelines.

January 16th update

Nothing new to report here. We will be meeting with Flat Toads on January 29th. That's the next big step for us.

January 9th Update

This was a big week for the technology infrastructure group! We began the week by having a conversation with Flat Toads Consulting. Flat Toads specializes in building school technology infrastructure and educational technology integration. Our talk focused on planning for our meeting with the folks and Cisco and preparing for our conversations. We discussed briefly how we might work with Flat Toads but decided that we should re-group once we learned more about Cisco's offerings and where the school would be located.

On Wednesday Aaron, Leah, Katie and I met with two representatives from Cisco and Greg from the DOE. In addition, the lead of the District Information Technology department called into the meeting. We heard about the type of infrastructure the DOE and Cisco would be able to provide to us. It became clear that they would be helpful in some ways and less helpful in others. We decided to continue our talks with Flat Toads in the hopes that they may be able to guide us through some of the process of getting our technology program up and running. We have scheduled a meeting with the group on Thursday, Jan 29th at 2pm.

We also have a trip scheduled to visit iSchool, which Cisco helped to set up and they are modeling the type of infrastructure the DOE is offering. In addition to iSchool, we have identified some additional schools in the city and one in Philadelphia that we are going to contact and try to set up visits to within the next month.

Our group's next step is to have this meeting on the 29th and put together a timeline of milestones that can guide the progress of the group.