Good Morning SCH,

I’m a couple days late, but welcome back from a long weekend.  I hope you all found time to relax with your families during the holiday, I certainly did and loved every minute of it.  Before I get into the subject matter of the post, I want to remind you all that playoff hockey is upon us, in addition to the beginning of the Phillies season.  So far it’s been a slow start, but let’s give our Phils a chance, they’ve earned that!  As for the Flyers, I think we’re in for a heck of a fight with the Pittsburg Penguins.  Who’s your pick for the battle of Pennsylvania??

I’d like to dedicate the remainder of this blog post to new technology in the classroom, and how we as educators can both learn and implement emerging tools into daily teaching practice.  I’m including two blog posts that I’ve recently enjoyed reading that focus on teacher development and the roles of educators and administrators in K-12 Twenty-First century learning.

The first When it comes to Technology, teachers need as much scaffolding as students is an edublog post from Mark Gleeson who has been working in the field of education for 25 years.  He focuses on how teachers are handling the implementation of new technology in the classroom without full knowledge on how to use the tools.  Technology is often thrust upon educators with the expectation that it will be effectively integrated into existing pedagogical practices.  Gleeson suggests that:

“We can’t just hand over thousands of dollars of equipment and expect teachers to be accountable for the effective use of it if they don’t know how. So what do we do about it?”

Consider this, iPads take the place of laptops in the near future (this is a completely made up scenario folks, do not panic!), wouldn’t you think a major investment in iOS PD is necessary to complement the new tools?  I’m not going to rehash this entire blog post, but I’ll add his 5-point recommendations on how to handle teaching withe technology.  Hopefully this will peak your interest enough to read the full article and post some insight on how you feel about the state of technology at SCH and how we as a team of innovation can improve on developing teacher’s tech skills for improved teaching practices.

1. PLTs dedicated to Technology integration into our teaching practices

2. A constant focus on Technology throughout lesson and unit planning

3. A restructuring of the role of ICT Leaders/teachers in schools

4. A greater focus on Technology in Teacher Training programs

5. A commitment to Technology Professional Development courses on an equal footing with Literacy and Numeracy Projects.

Be sure to check out the rest of the blog post for details on each of these points.

The second blog post written by Cathy Davidson of DMLCentral A Collaborative Guide to Best Digital Learning Practices for K-12 relates to Gleeson’s post in that the focus is on the use of digital tools by educators (teachers & administrators) to foster learning amongst students.   I’ve highlighted a few key points of the blog post, but PLEASE checkout the entire post and add your thoughts or comments below.  I’ve said this a few times, but SCHift 2.0 is on it’s way with much more intuitive discussion capabilities.  Feel free to email your thoughts to me as well, I can certainly add them to comment field of the blog.  Here are a few of the key points to Cathy’s post:

We need support for teacher training, including scheduled time for teacher collaboration and idea-sharing, in order for tools to be part of real learning in the most productive, creative way.

We need administrators to take the lead with digital technology, not simply requiring teachers and students to use it but actually modeling the effective use of technology.

We need the right platforms for collaboration to ensure that technology is part of the content of learning.

We need to create a community among teachers using best practices and research to show the benefits of innovation and creative, collaborative partnerships in education.

There is much more to depth to the post, so please check it out.

I’ll close this week’s Daytime post with a video peek into an emerging technological innovation that we might see in our classrooms before you know it.

Click here for an Edudemic article that discusses the possibilities of Google Glasses in the classroom.

Go Flyers!!!!!!!!!!!!