Thursday, December 27, 2007

A Technology Plan For My School

Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to improve student learning at the Distributed Learning (DL) school where I teach. Jeff Utecht's series of posts on developing a tech plan have really clarified my thinking on this. This is my current 'wish list' for my school:
  • provide all 8 - 10 students with lap tops (currently we provide computers for most 8 - 10s, but laptops only to those students who will be traveling.)
  • offer more 'mini courses' to 8 - 10s on specific web 2.0 topics--eg a mini-course on blogging where the students come to our school with their laptops to learn with each other how to set up and effectively use a blog.
  • Improve our school website so that it becomes the effective portal that Jeff Utech discusses in his tech plan series.
  • Move to a single Learning Management System (LMS)--currently we use Moodle, Web CT and we have paper based courses. I would like to see us move to something like Moodle (though I need to learn much more about it to fully understand all that it can offer). I'm leaning toward Moodle because it is free open source software and from what I've seen so far it does a pretty good job.
  • Educate our students' parents about the web 2.0 tools that we are using with their kids so that have less fear about their kids being on-line. Perhaps a series of workshops, or invitations to parents to attend and participate in the 'mini courses' that I mentioned earlier.
  • Student Information System? Is ours working? Can it work better (I think so)?
I'm sure I'll add more to my list in the coming weeks, but this is a start at least.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for dropping by my blog. Looks like you are exploring similar issues in your role as a teacher as I am so good luck with that. Sarah

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  2. Hi Clair, Thanks for the link and for reading my blog. We are working on a school and district tech plan right now. Our middle school is using a wiki to write our plan. We have also referenced a good deal from Jeff Utecht. Our plan is at our wiki. Please feel free to send comments along through the contact page on my blog as it seems we are thinking about similar issues.

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