Saturday, August 22, 2009

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.

Friday, August 14, 2009

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.