Pearson Visit August 1st

The next Tech Steering Committee meeting will be held on Monday, August 1st at 6:00 p.m. in the Unity High School cafeteria.  Scott Drossos, Senior V.P. of Pearson Education, will be present to meet with members of the committee.  Board of Education members have also been invited to attend. 

The Adams County Fair will be going on that night, so we will try to keep the meeting brief. 

The agenda will include final review/approval of 1:1 user policies, professional development plan, and other implementation details.  Committee members will receive more information prior to the meeting.

(Article) The Seven Golden Rules of using technology in schools

Sometimes teachers and administrators need a kick in the pants to see what they perceive as problems re-framed in a different way. Adam S. Bellow, author of The Tech Commandments, and founder of eduTecher, spoke to a roomful of receptive teachers at the recent ISTE 2011 conference, and demonstrated some of the ironies and contradictions the education system is mired in. And he had some advice.

Read More

Upcoming subcommittee dates

 Wednesday June/22 - Finance
6:00pm Unity

Tuesday June/28 - Infrastructure
6:00pm Unity

Thursday July/7 - Curriculum
11:00am NorthSide Restaurant

If you were not able to make our last meeting, please join one of these subcommittees as you see fit.

Year I Concept Plan for 1:1

The Steering Committee approved a concept plan for the first year of implementing a 1:1 learning environment at Unit #4.  The plan will be presented to the Board of Education for approval.  Click here to view the plan.

Here is the PDF of the June 6th meeting presentation. Since there is an interest, here is the March presentation as well.

PowerSchool – Studio Edition. This is a Pearson School System’s product that we are very likely to be implementing. One thing that our district is lacking is a way to consistently asses all of our students against state standards. Normally this is done once every few years, and by that point it’s too late to change anything.  This product would align our testing, weekly or however the teacher decides, to Common Core standards and allow the theachers to constantly know how the students are doing in relation to where they need to be.

Also, Pearson has a “One to One” Professional Development schedule available and here are the sessions that they offer.  Please look over what is available so you can see what we would be able to offer to our staff.

Meeting dates

From the response we recieved to the meeting dates survey it appears that the best date and time to meet is the first monday of the month. 

Normally, that would be May 2nd but as it is fast approaching and we would like to fill the meetings with meaningful content, our next meeting will be June 6th at 6:00pm and will be every 1st Monday of the months following.
If this date is unacceptable and you will not be able to be part of this committee because of that, please let Diane know so we can plan accordingly.

Mooresville , NC visit

The trip to Mooresville, NC was quite the experience. If we could have everybody involved visit their school district and see what they are doing, we would.

One thing I want to reiterate is that 1:1 is so much more than every student having a laptop. It s a complete change in how the students aproach learning and how learning is presented to them. And also that as we look into 1:1 we understand that a very key component is Professional Development and that we can t possibly succeed if that component is not there.

Most of what I post is going to be from a technical standpoint, and involves the things that concern me so remember that.

This is in one of their Intermediate Schools and notice how they have WiFi Access points every 20 feet or so in the hallway. For the students to be able to take their laptops from classroom to classroom this was very important.

This room is key to making sure that every year goes well. This bench holds 105 laptops at a time and is used to image them. Imaging is the process of making a copy of a computer s Hard Drive, the image , and basically pasting that copy onto lots of other hard drives all at once. Every year a call goes out to all the teachers to let the tech staff know what software they need in their classroom and those software packages go into the image to be deployed during the summer.

Behind the scenes is a series of server racks and networking equipment that serves the district. These are 3 of 4 main server racks and these control the internet filtering, login accounts, email, student information system, imaging, and classroom management software. All of this needs cooling as well so there are dozens of case fans all pulling and pushing air around. This was a very loud room and I m glad that we only stayed in there as long as we needed to.

All Laptops were barcoded and had an asset tag that was entered into a database so they could keep track of all the students and who had what machine. When the next year rolled around, each student recieving the exact same machine that they may have abused last year was disheartening and is a deterrent for them abusing the equipment.

Update on Tuesday, April 5, 2011 at 10:20AM by Gabriel Forrester (Tech Director)

Here are some links to the Mooresville District’s website:

Mooresville Graded School District Home Page

MGSD Digital Conversion page This one has lots of information about the process they took to implement what they have, as well as how they plan to keep it going.