Wormbog

Here are some of my thoughts from a conference I attended at Penn State on one-to-one computing. I will add other thoughts as I have more time.

Wow!  The Penn State One-to-One Conference was great.  The material was relevant.  The presenters were excellent.  The format was efficient.

I noticed in the participants list that we were the only Christian school at the event.  This conference was really more about innovation in education than about one-to-one programs.  The PA public schools have been very innovative in the classroom but I sensed that they struggle with why they are doing it.  Christian schools have a reason why, we should be setting the standard for innovation in the school.

Here are the highlights from the sessions I attended:

• Goals of one-to-one must be clearly defined
  • The goal should not be to improve test scores
  • The goals need to centered around classroom engagement and student creativity
    • One of the things that set this conference apart from any other for me was the level of engagement because of the use of technology.  Almost every session included audience participation through tools like polleverywhere.com
  • Is our goal one-to-one? Why?
• Online Learning
  • 28 states have public schools that are completely online, most others are developing them
  • Need to read Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen
  • Look at Apex Learning, Plato Learning, Aleks
  • We need to put greater effort in to exploring existing online offerings and creating our own
  • How do we train our teachers to be online teachers?
  • What Christian organizations are already working on this?
• Technology Adoption Life Cycle
  • Move from Substitution to Modification to Redefinition
  • We bounce between substitution and modification, how do we move to redefinition?
• Open Source is key in sustainability
  • Chrome, Linux, OpenOffice are all things we already use or watch closely
  • We need to look at open content
    • Freereading.net
    • Ck12  Flexbooks  (take a look a the physics textbooks)
    • Archive.org
    • OpenCourseware (MIT)
    • Wikibooks
    • blendedschools.net
  • Where could we use this content?
• Moodle – Course Management
  • Excellent open source course management tool
  • We need to setup a pilot for this for professional development and a summer course