Beginning

This past June, I was chosen along with 5 other teachers in the WSFC School system to particpate in a 1:1 Device Pilot during the 2012-2013 school year.  I teach middle school Foreign Languages; French, Spanish, and Intro. to World Languages.  I'm a lateral entry teacher, 8 years experience.  I've gotten a lot of opportunities to learn in the years I've been with WSFCS. - Looks like this might be the grandest of all.

The first contact was a congratulatory call from the Assistant Superintendant for Technology, Betty Weyker.  We joined our principals, Tech Facilitators and other particpants in a conference call.  It was.. exciting.

I met with Marty Creech, District Instructional Technologist one-on-one to talk about my initial thoughts of how I want my classroom to "work" and what I'm hoping to accomplish this school year.  I'm a Techie by nature so I've already had lots of experience with apps, and online resources in the classroom, but having each student have a laptop (and that's what I was chosen to "try out"), is definitely going to be different.  My students have done some individual/group technology work - but daily?????!! Really?  How could I get everything else done if the students were going to use them daily?

Marty passed along my Lenovo X130e - so we could get to know one another - it's a sweet, light, sturdy, great battery-life, good operating memory a built in camera  - I think it will do the trick.

I've looked at the Flipped Classroom model.  I like it. Marty says we have to consider if everyone will have a device at home and will it be compatible.  Good Point.  He introduced PBL - Project Based Learning with the concept "Community of Learners"    The simple idea is students are introduced to the objectives they need to learn, we create a "project" to cover the objectives, adding formative assessments along the way and they learn the material together in groups - I facilitate.

For 3 days last week, 5 of the 6 of us joined together to begin to figure out the nuts and bolts.  I'm attaching an Animoto I created the 2nd day to overview Day 1.  We talked about Community of Learners, Copyright, Internet Safety, Best Practices, Classroom Management, Internet Use Survey - to mention only a few.  I'm very lucky to have been given the laptop to pilot - 3 others are using tablets - and I just don't think they're as easy to integrate as laptops.

Oh, we're using Edmodo to communicate amongst one another - it's great! Marty has created a blog for us to reflect ~wkly.  It really helped to have all of us together last week creating/sharing set up documents: Tech Survey, Classroom Management, Copyright, Acceptable Use Policy, I'll attach those as well. Just remember, these were all created BEFORE we stepped into our Learning Communities! You know how things change when you close that classroom door!

I remember teaching a couple classes in Computers several years back when I was trying to stay full time, splitting between two schools.  The toughest part was to keep the students synchronised while trying to accomplish the same task.  Although, I have bad dreams about that struggle, I recognize that we won't be acomplishing the same task. Each student will be on his or her own task.  My job will be to guide, not drag.