…read all over?

A History of a very well known company. I let it flow over the edges of the usual writing space to give you an envelope view proportion. Enjoy!

David Kapuler spends a good deal of his time discovering folks on the Web who are talented and generous. One of the recent additions to his interviewees is Naomi Harm. This her list of tools. It is far-reaching, and easy to the eye. I would advise you to take a look:

http://file2.ws/web16

I have been preparing all Summer to go to work at Pioneer Valley Regional School in Northfield Massachusetts.

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.

First TJ Shay wrote this and tagged Pat Hensley; Then Pat Hensley, aka loonyhiker, wrote this and tagged me.

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

The only buildings built for ‘public’ activities that are more underused than schools are churches. In most communities many of these buildings could be open seven days a week if the ‘owners’ would take off the blinders of how these places have been traditionally used and let their vision expand.

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.