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, 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.
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.
