We have our new Middle School Lab – my classroom – fully operational. We installed the SMARTboard last week. We have only to add an in-room printer and it will be complete.

When we assembled the table we set the height at 28 inches, which is working very well. We have a carpeted floor so we all have swivel chairs. We also have room for work tables in the center of the room, and plenty of closet space for all sorts of supplies and equipment.

We have four host computers and sixteen clients. We are running N-Computing for our environment. The only drawback is we don’t have a USB in the clients.

All in all, it’s a great space. I hope great things will happen here!

I cannot stop smiling.

I am going work with the seventh grade three days a week and the High School Keyboarding Class five days. The balance of the time I will the Technology Integrator for both the Middle School and the High School.

This is a brand new position, so the tablet is blank.

I have written this following the rules written in bold:

TJ Shay’s rules are: “List FIVE changes you would like to see in the educational system. Your responses should represent your perspective and your passion for learning and students…tag the following people…from a variety of perspectives. If you have been tagged, tag as many people as you choose, but try for a variety.”

1. To quote Ryan Bretag, “Leaders <should> tap the shoulders of professionals in the classroom to give them a greater responsibility and a stronger voice to encourage the personalization of learning opportunities designed as a community.

2. School Boards, Administrators-all policy makers and enforcers- must get over the ‘fear’ of digital tools that they manifest and foster. Blocking pornography, conforming to CIPA for Federal funding, should be the extent of the policy for filtering in schools. They have not banned writing implements for what is scribbled in the restrooms, so why do they do what they do to access to technology?

3. Collaboration should blossom face-to-face the way it has in PLNs. Don’t sit in Teachers’ Room and complain, collaborate in research and reporting to make things happen, to make things change.

4. Schools should be open seven days a week. As I said in an earlier post the only places more underused than schools are churches. When fuel prices skyrocketed last year, the first thing you heard from managers was that schools might go to four-day schedules. My gut feeling was antithetical to that – the only way that is a saving is in travel dollars. The extra hardships of childcare and sitting in under-heated houses and apartments, while the school environments are maintained, are unconscionable.

5. Individualize education plans and group students by needs and desires rather than by credits earned and courses completed.

I tag these colleagues from Plurk:

Char Young @charyoung – Homeschool educator and tutor
John Martin @edventures – Technology architect in higher ed
Scott Carter @scarter – ex-Biology teacher, ex-principal, and now a superintendent
Elizabeth Koh @elizabethkoh – Doctoral candidate and teaching ass’t at the National University of Singapore
Kobus van Wyck @kobus – Director of Khanya Program-providing ICT services to disadvantaged schools in South Africa

It drove me up a tree to hear administrators say that we may have to cut back to a four day school week when the price of fuel was skyrocketing. In the face of that pain, throughout most of the communities in our country, the response should have been that we need to work our way to having our schools open seven days a week, not closing them an extra day. And, if needs be, convert some of our space to emergency shelters for folks who cannot keep their homes heated and buy and cook their food.

It did my heart good to see the worship services in our cafeteria when one of our local churches was damaged in a flood.

I am in school often on the weekends and here during the week often after most of my colleagues and students have left for the day. The feeling is the identical to the feeling I had in the churches I served in when I was a parish clergyman. I felt then and feel now as though we are squandering a tremendous resource: that we are not being good stewards of what we have been given to manage.

Our school now has Saturday Academy, Distance Learning, and expanded ’school day’ through the funding that comes through the 21st Century Grant. This is just the beginning. We should ultimately be doing so much more.

This is the beginning of our discussion of being lifelong learners.

1. Online learning for professional development;

2. The applicablility of online learning for the community-at-large.

After these issues are reflected upon, we can begin to build our ’school for lifelong learners’.

Since teaching is my third career, I’m a rather a newbie at this. The first time I had heard the phrase ‘life-long learner’ in context  was six years ago. It sound so bright and exciting and I could understand the lack of enthusiasm on the part of my colleagues who had been teachers for a while.

It wasn’t long until I realized that every district or school mission statement I came across contained that phrase. For my colleagues it had become a cliche. Worse, it was an empty cliche – No one ever explored or discussed what this meant and how it would be facilitated.

One of the paths that can be provided for people to be life-long learners is through online learning: Joining classes on the World Wide Web.

There are several places a prospective online learner can go to read enumerations and discussions of the pros and cons of online learning including:

http://www.edu-center.org/distance-learning-pros-cons.htm

http://www.learn-source.com/schools/pro_con_online.html

http://www.elearners.com/resources/elearning-faq5.asp

If you are out of school-either high school or college-online learning should be an option in continuing your own personal growtth and development.

Do you answer questions when students ask you directly?

Do you try to spur debate by telling students who your candidate is?

Do you try to spur higher level thinking in students’ minds by explaining your decision-making process in relation to a social and political issues?

I fear that if I don’t strike a balance, all my living, learning, and teaching will end up being dust in the wind.