Yes Tech!

I am facilitating a 8th Studies unit on the rise of big business after the Civil War. The unit includes data analysis and graph making in Excel, creating queries using a huge railroad construction database (MS Access), inquiry & research based on the data, and finally creating an interactive timeline with PowerPoint. It’s all on Moodle and ALL 8th graders will do this project (about 1200 students). The 8th grade SS teachers have been fantastic to work with - enthusiastic and open to this new delivery of instruction. We had some “issues” on the first day. The server couldn’t handle so many students hitting it at once and it was a bust. However, our tech dept understood the importance of having the technology work for this project, and the whole thing was moved to a new server last night. Today, it worked great! The students love it and the teachers do, too. Grading is a snap and the ability to offer prompt feedback is invaluable. Our district uses this project as a performance assessment to determine if our 8th grade students are “tech proficient,” something each Michigan district reports to the state at the end of the schoolyear. I love Moodle!

The Michigan House of Representatives reported its 2008 budget recommendations last week.  The budget included $38,000,000 for 21st century learning environments.   The idea was for the Michigan Dept of Ed to work with school districts, ISDs, businesses, and innovative education organizations to create a state-wide initiative to create academic content and digital curriculum.  The funds would be used to provide professional development, create a content repository, coordinate efforts with other programs, and assist districts in obtaining innovative content creation and distribution tools.

Sounds great!  However the Detroit News and Free Press (to name a few newspapers) reported that the state would purchase an i-Pod for every Michigan student.   Letters to the editor written by Michigan citizens about this idea have been less than favorable, as you might guess.

The initiative as laid out by the legislature is much more than a device purchase program.  It includes professional development for educators, sharing of resources, and collaboration.  It’s too bad that the initial communication to the public was done in a way that leads to negativity.

I am reminded once again that the leaders of our state are supporters of educational technology to be used to improve instruction.

Many of the teachers I work with have asked about Flickr, what I use to add photos to this blog.  Here is a screencast created by Jeff Uteche, author of The Thinking Stick blog.  Thanks, Jeff.

I am looking for school districts that allow students to have & use electronic devices at school, as this is something we are looking into in my Michigan district. It seems that students have them at school anyway. What are the benefits? Risks? I would appreciate seeing examples of policies that other districts have implemented.