Digital Eyes

I am at the TIES Conference in Minneapolis. There have been some great presentations and I wanted to share about them. But first I wanted to share a thought that has been bothering me. Where are our teachers? It is important for tech support people and integration specialists to see and hear all the information that is shared here, but it is far MORE important for our classroom teachers to see what is happening in other classrooms. As I watch teachers present on how they are using blogs, clickers, GoogleDocs, Scratch, and many other great tools in their classrooms, I keep thinking how it is the classroom teachers who should be making up the majority of the audience. I'd love to hear peoples' ideas on how we can make that happen. One solution is to share all the handouts and presentations from all the sessions. Go to http://wiki.ties.k12.mn.us/Conference+General+Sessions and click on any presenter to download their presentation.

Lou Paff from Oregon Episcopal School is presenting now on using these two tools in the classroom. These are basic programming tools for elementary age students. Students train icons to move throughout an environment. They use problem solving skills, patterning, geometry, and many other skills to figure out how to make it work. Lou is using Scratch with 2nd graders. Scratch is a free download. Kids create a product and debug it as they go. What a great problem solving skill! All finished products can be uploaded to the website: http://scratch.mit.edu to be shared with the world. You can also collaborate with others once it is uploaded. Imagine designing your program to create geometric shapes as a way to learn about angles, shapes, coordinates, etc... Lou is showing us an example in which students used paint tools to create an icon, called a sprite, and wrote a script to make the sprite walk, turn, change appearance, speak, and interact with another sprite. It is an animation. I know...

This past Saturday, December 1st, Wayzata Public Schools hosted a Futures Conference. State representatives, board members, administrators, teachers, parents, business leaders, and community members braved the snow (it is MN, after all) to spend a day learning about the trends of the future and discussing their implications on our schools and community. Gary Marx , author of Sixteen Trends, Their Profound Impact on Our Future , led the conference with a presentation on the sixteen trends he writes about in his book. I have included them below. From there, each table, made up of a cross section of the community, had a discussion about the implications of these trends on our schools, students, and communities. The discussions were great. At my table we discussed the need for more world language instruction, more focus on the process of learning rather than content, creating lifelong learners, connecting our schools to our local businesses and community members, serving the needs of all o...

At a meeting yesterday, someone shared this idea with the group. We were discussing power standards and strategically choosing which standards to focus on in order to have the greatest impact in a classroom. We have all heard it before. We have probably all thought it before. How do we fit all the content expected of us into one year? It got me thinking also about technology and its role in transforming our classrooms. How do we make time for it when we are busy preparing for high stakes tests and making sure our students don't get "left behind"? I often hear teachers talk about what to eliminate from their day to make time for new initiatives or new curricula. I think it is helpful for me to think about it in terms of prioritizing instead of eliminating. What are the MOST IMPORTANT skills your students need to learn ? What are the skills that are taught because "we've always taught it"? What skills might benefit your students across all curricular areas? W...

Teachers are evolutionary. They start each year fresh, making adaptations to the way they did things in the past. Each year, getting incrementally better. They look back at their notes and change a lesson here or there, fine tuning their instruction. They reflect throughout the summer about missed opportunities and how they will not let that happen this year. They sift through files, throwing out old files and making room for new ideas. These are important processes for teachers to embrace change and try new things. Unfortunately, it is too slow. With the speed at which technology changes, teachers need to undergo a metamorphosis in order to transform into technology savvy instructors. The question is, how to do we take chimps and turn them into butterflies. Chimps are good animals. They are highly evolved, social, intelligent animals. But they can not grow wings in a week's time. They can develop opposable thumbs, given a few thousand years, but we are looking for transformation, ...

I have the wonderful opportunity (and responsibility) to research and select some software for our elementary school computer labs. I have a moderate budget, but it is enough to purchase 3-5 new titles depending on costs. The committee will meet throughout this year and hopefully make its decision by March. I am very interested in the feedback of others, both within the district and elsewhere. We currently have some software in the labs that are still being used. This is an opportunity to fill in some gaps. I also want to go on record as stating that I recognize that there are many websites, free or otherwise, that can meet some of our needs. However, as we collect websites for specific skills and concepts, we are learning that there are often drawbacks to many of them, whether it is the fact that they are not part of a cohesive program that can track progress and individualize instruction or that they have many distracting elements on the screen. I also feel strongly that the core of ...

In my interactions with teachers from all over the district, I often come across people who wonder why technology seems to be taking over schools. When I talk with Language Arts teachers and tell them that we need to redefine language arts to include a broader definition of literacy that includes media and hyperlinked texts , I often get strange looks as if I am upsetting the very foundation on which we are standing. In some ways, I guess I am. Let me be clear. I am a firm believer in the importance of reading and writing. I love books in every sense of the word. I do not read ebooks just for the sake of saying that I can. But reading in today’s society is not the same as it was when we were in school, or even as it was 5 years ago. A huge shift has taken place. Reading takes place online as often as it does in books. Reading today include hyperlinks to other pages instead of linear books with tables of content. Reading today means access to everyone’s opinions, not just two or three e...

Recently, I read Karl Fisch’s post on “Is it Okay to be a Technologically Illiterate Teacher?” . It got me thinking about this issue as well. Karl asks whether technology skills are the equivalent of reading and writing skills in the past. Does the success of our students depend on their ability to use technology? I think we could make an argument for this. Certainly our world is becoming increasingly technology-centric. Our businesses use technology for communication, research, data analysis, graphics, and so much more. That does not surprise people. I think what tends to surprise people is the way in which technology has wormed its way into other professions, as well as our personal lives. From farmers to auto mechanics , technology is becoming a larger and larger part of the jobs our students will do in the future. In our personal lives, banking, shopping, communicating, and much more are becoming more dependent on technology. It seems to me that Karl may have a point. Look at how m...

Recently, I have heard numerous teachers share this sentiment in one form or another. As our district works to get a great deal of new technology up and running this year, there is a lot of frustration when things don't work as planned. Specifically, we have installed a great deal of SmartBoards, projectors, and sound fields. Unexpected issues have put us behind schedule and some of our teachers have had to start the school year without their equipment working yet. My first reaction to these comments is to share in their frustration. Many of these teachers went out of their way to take training during the summer so they would have time to practice with the new equipment, create resources, and get used to a new way of doing things. They should have had access to the equipment so they could accomplish this. To their credit, most of the teachers I have spoken with have not let this stumbling block dampen their spirit. They are still committed to learning how to use the equipment in th...

Earlier this week, our district brought in Pat Quinn , author of Changing Lives, to speak about the importance of building relationships. He was very well received and inspired our staff to think about how our actions impact our students. It got me thinking about how technology impacts relationships. I often hear from concerned teachers that technology is isolating and is counter to building relationships. I understand this concern. I have seen computer labs filled with students who are absorbed by their screens and disconnected by those around them. They use headphones to keep the lab quiet at the expense of interacting with their neighbors. They are not required to discuss, relate, or share in any way. But is this what technology is really all about? I say no. I say technology is about connecting people across time and space. In my classroom, students are using the technology as a tool to analyze, create, collaborate, and communicate. Technology means communicating with the world thr...

I can feel it. There's a change. The conversations are different. People are excited. Rooms are transforming. On a Friday before school starts, I have now spent two weeks talking to teachers, teaching classes, visiting classrooms. This year feels different. Of course, the new hardware helps. Projectors, SmartBoards, soundfields mean that the technology is in the classrooms now. Teachers sound excited. I have been so impressed by the turn out at the summer trainings. In my conversations, I hear teachers asking great questions and wanting to try new things. The stereotype of teachers who won't change, who are stuck in the dark ages. That isn't true here. These teachers are doing great things already. I can't wait for the kids to arrive. This will be a whole new world for them. All day, everyday, connected to the world, interactive classrooms, multisensory lessons. This is going to be great!!

Last week, Wayzata Public Schools hosted the Smart Institute from Smart Technologies. It was a great conference with presenters from around the U.S. and Canada. The keynote speakers were Ben Hazzard and Joan Badger from Canada. They are the hosts of a great podcast called pdtogo.com. I highly recommend listening to it for great Smartboard ideas. They spoke about the stages of implementation. I liked the development from starting with what you know, playing with premade lessons, then creating your own lessons with websites and gallery objects. Next, comes student involvement in activities and finally is collaboration. This is helpful to me to know that teachers need time to move through these stages. While I want to see rapid development, I need to make sure that teachers have time to play around with premade lessons and get used to the tools before the jump into the later stages. They also shared a lot of great resources including voicethread, gapminder, swivel, and keepvid. I'll b...

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I watched a movie entitled "Paper Clips" To me, this movie embodies what technology integration is all about. The movie is a documentary about a rural Tennessee school that starts to collect paper clips to represent the 6,000,000 Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. Now the premise of the project has nothing to do with technology. However, it is technology that connects this community with the world and creates a learning experience that will affect these students forever. By posting information about the project to the web, they attract the attention of some people around the world. Many famous people began donating paper clips. Holocaust survivors from New York came to visit them and share their experiences. German journalists get involved and help ship an authentic World War II German rail car used for shipping people to concentration camps. The rail car now houses a museum at the school that documents the project. Now this would have bee...

My name is Dave Zukor. I am the elementary technology integration specialist for Wayzata Public Schools in Minnesota. Before my current role, I was a technology teacher in a computer lab for grades 1-5. I also spent 10 years in a classroom teaching grades 3, 4, and 5.

"Technology does not drive change- it enables change." -unknown source  I am starting this blog as a resource for the staff here at Wayzata Public Schools, as well as anyone else out there who may find it useful. I hope to provide ideas on how to build classrooms in which our students are connected to the world. I don't just mean that they have Internet access, but that they are global citizens who interact with the world. They author to a global audience, they have conversations with people around the world, understand the different perspectives that people around the world bring to the discussion, and effectively and responsibly use tools that allow for these kinds of connections. I hope you will take part in this discussion by reading and commenting on this and future posts. I look forward to hearing from you.