1 Period 2 Weeks 3 Teachers

1 Period 2 Weeks 3 Teachers

Last Tuesday I was given 10 minutes at the staff meeting to update the high school staff on tech happenings here at ISB. This would be the most time I’ve spend in front of the entire high school staff this year and I wanted to try and use the time to demonstrate technology and inform them of up coming changes […]

You’re listening to ISB Radio

You’re listening to ISB Radio

One of my goals moving into the high school technology coordinator position was to start a radio club with students. Now 3 months into the school year and we’re learning a lot and producing some good quality shows. It has been fun working through issues with students. We had feedback in a couple episodes and finally figured out it was […]

Tracking Independent Reading in high school

Tracking Independent Reading in high school

As I started talking about in my last post, we’re in the process of setting every high school student up with a blog to use as an e-portfolio. To help you wrap your head around why we’re using blogs as our container for this, I suggest downloading and reading the Free PDF I produced at the end of last year. […]

At the speed of a click

At the speed of a click

(Scribefire, my blogging platform finally updated to work with Firefox Beta 4 so now I’m back!) I had the most incredible experience today. First of all I’m loving working with the high school kids. They just ‘get it’. I don’t have to explain things at a very deep level and we can just fly through the technology stuff and get […]

Finding Common Ground

Finding Common Ground

One of my biggest challenges this year is going to help the High School as a whole find some common ground on expectations for class work and interaction using our Moodle site. We use Moodle as an extension of the classroom. A place to handout work, to turn in assignments, and to have discussions via forms and chats. This will […]

Breaking up the Perfect Team

Breaking up the Perfect Team

If you follow baseball than you know that there have been two perfect games thrown this year. These are games in which the pitcher only pitches to 27 batters (3outs x 9innings). It’s a rare thing, in fact it’s only happening 20 times to date in all of baseball history. It’s called the perfect game. Where everything just works, just […]

Games and Bugs

Games and Bugs

As our first Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy program (COETAIL) draws to a close here at ISB educators are starting to put the finishing touches on their projects for the 5th and final course. They’ve been working all semester on putting into practice what we’ve been learning about the first 4 courses. They have been paired with a […]

The Next Phase of Technology at ISB

The Next Phase of Technology at ISB

Last week our IT Director, Chad Bates, gave a presentation to the ISB School Board outlining the next phase of technology use at ISB. The phase includes a plan to go 1:1 starting next year with grade 6 students. It’s an exciting time to be at ISB and I for one am looking forward to rolling out the 1:1 program […]

Facebook, Privacy, and Cyber bullying

Facebook, Privacy, and Cyber bullying

Just returning from a full day of thinking and teaching starting with Saturday school and talking to some students who got in trouble for cyber bullying on Facebook. I love getting the opportunity to talk to students about their social world and continue to find it fascinating on their views of what they consider “their world”. My wife, being the […]

Bring Buzz to Edu Apps

Bring Buzz to Edu Apps

Google Buzz has been out for a while now and has been slowly making its mark on the social-networking scene. As I’ve been investigating Buzz (a.k.a. playing with it…but investigating sounds so much more important!) and how it changes social-networking, it hit me the other day how this might just be the communication tool I’ve been looking for in schools […]