One year on… and still learning

Having just celebrated the First Birthday of Teacher Friendly Tech, I decided to have a read over “the year that was.”

Not sure whether that was a good thing or not. But through the haze of what has happened, the important things shone out, and will continue to do so. The main one being Passion for our Students’ learning.

We seemed to come back from ELH-2007 fired up and wanting to change the world, well our little slice of it in Paradise that is. We have managed to take small steps since then, but nothing like we envisioned during our catch up sessions at the end of each day. It’s amazing how things can happen that send ripples through the whole College, and affect us all in ways we wouldn’t have thought. These ripples started whilst we were away at Lorne, we got to see the bits and pieces that filtered out to us through email. Lets just say 2007/2008 has been a interesting time.

So now ELH-2008 is over. Again we were well represented there. We had 2 of our Heads of School’s – Junior and Senior, our ICT Learning Coordinator K-12, our K-6 Curriculum Coordinator, a Stage 2 Teacher looking for the next step, and myself. It would have been fantastic to have our Principal and Head of Middle School there as well, but we intend to pass on the things that we brought away.

Now for the challenge. It’s been a few days since our return. A bit of time to unravel all those thoughts and see what directions we should take. Now for the lessons learned:

• We are meeting tomorrow to debrief and decide how we as a group are going to present this to the College
• This should include some form of SWOT as to where we are now, and of course where we want to take our Students.
• Then we need to look at what needs to be done to get there
• Many ideas were thrown around at Lorne. These include:
  1. Laptops for Middle School, incl. what type of Form Factor to use for them?
  2. Laptops for Senior School.
  3. Voluntary of Compulsory Laptop programs?
  4. How to promote integration?
  5. How do we get “the time” that we need?

• What staffing changes need to be made to achieve our goals?
• The need to develop and promote Positive Professional Development for staff, make it specific to our Campus, and the Infrastructure and Technology that is in place.
• Inclusion of our School Admin System into the bigger picture. PC School is a wide ranging application that we are using about 10% of at present. We need to make staff aware of its power, and how it will streamline things if used appropriately.
• Can we implement an Intermediate LMS until we get Scholaris? Will this just confuse the issue?
• Internet Filtering (one of my all time gripes) and its place, or not, in Education. How do we get around this issue, and what levels should get what access?

As you can see this list could go on and on. These are only my thoughts, what will be added when we all get together? I’ll have my Tablet at the ready, and will no doubt be scribbling Diagram’s and taking notes. Lets see what we end up with……