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On Sat­ur­day, Feb­ru­ary 4th, 2012 I had the plea­sure of tak­ing part in a Class­room 2.0 Live webi­nar where we were talk­ing about all things Evernote.

I spoke for about 40 min­utes and took ques­tions for about another 40 or so.  They’ve posted a recap of the webi­nar on the Live Class­room 2.0 web site (live.classroom20.com/1/post/2012/02/using-evernote.html).

I am includ­ing the video from the webi­nar below, but I encour­age you to take a look at their site as they have include a vert large num­ber of related links.

 

As a kid I played Dun­geons and Drag­ons a lot!

On week­ends my friends and I would get together play through­out the night.  We’d spend hours dia­gram­ming maps, dun­geons, fan­tasy worlds and com­ing up with new and out­ra­geous adventures.

We were incred­i­bly pas­sion­ate about what we were doing.

In 1982 when I about 11-year-old, I intro­duce a rel­a­tive of mine, Michael Miller (@M_S_Miller_1000), to the game. I don’t remem­ber the exact cir­cum­stances, but I can assure you that there were small fig­urines, dice, books and draw­ing strewn about the space as we played.

The pas­sion and excite­ment for what I was doing what and I was teach­ing — the rules, mate­ri­als, char­ac­ters, etc — was trans­ferred over and yet another soul was sucked into the world of fan­tasy role-playing games (for the younger read­ers out there this is what you did before Wii, Playsta­tion and XBox).

The pas­sion and excite­ment for the sub­ject trans­ferred from one per­son to another.

Learn­ing by play­ing, learn­ing by DOING made all the difference.

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This was the sec­ond year in a row that I attended Educon for the Sat­ur­day ses­sions.  If you’ve never been to Educon before it is held at the Sci­ence Lead­er­ship Acad­emy (SLA) in cen­ter city Philadelphia.

If you have never been to Educon or SLA it is a very unique school and a very diverse conference.

The school is a part­ner­ship school between the City of Philadel­phia and The Franklin Insti­tute and “…and its com­mit­ment to inquiry-based sci­ence, SLA pro­vides a rig­or­ous, college-preparatory cur­ricu­lum with a focus on sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy, math­e­mat­ics and entre­pre­neur­ship”.

Educon is a three-day con­fer­ence which draw pre­sen­ters from around the coun­try and around the world. You are very likely to see peo­ple like Will Richard­son (@willrich45) and Gary Stager (@garystager) in the halls talk­ing between ses­sions with atten­dees and giv­ing pre­sen­ta­tions of their own (see below).  The conference’s guid­ing prin­ci­ples are:

1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thought­ful and empow­er­ing for all members
2. Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our stu­dents — the 21st Cen­tury Citizen
3. Tech­nol­ogy must serve ped­a­gogy, not the other way around
4. Tech­nol­ogy must enable stu­dents to research, cre­ate, com­mu­ni­cate and collaborate
5. Learn­ing can — and must — be networked

It is this last point… that “Learn­ing can — and must — be net­worked” that I think is one of the best parts of the con­fer­ence and learning.

I attended three-hour and a half ses­sions from Con­struc­tivism to Social Media PD to New Media Lit­era­cies and learned some­thing from all of them.

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[Part 3 in a series on insti­tu­tional data]

When an address change comes into your school who owns and enters that data into your system(s)? When stan­dard­ized test­ing scores come in, who enters the data? If an alum, who is also a par­ent has a new email address who makes the change? Which system(s) are involved? How are changes com­mu­ni­cated and shared?

When you are try­ing to make sense of the flow of infor­ma­tion within a school you need to be clear about whose respon­si­bil­ity it is and who (domain) owns the infor­ma­tion.  In an ear­lier post (Defin­ing Data Domains for Entry, Own­er­ship and Sup­port) I tried to define the dif­fer­ent data domains with a school and answer the ques­tion of who owns the data… but what data are we talk­ing about.

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I spent the morn­ing pour­ing over a num­ber of blog and ISED list­serv posts to try to catch up on the lat­est talk around the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device or BYOT - Tech­nol­ogy) debate in education.

I found many com­ments and ques­tions about sup­port, require­ments, a com­mon set of appli­ca­tions, web-based appli­ca­tions and ser­vices, along with men­tion of how a BYOD moves things to a more student-centered approach as the device is of their own choosing.

For our 1:1 Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive we spent a lot of time talk­ing through the rea­sons we were going down the road of pro­vid­ing every stu­dent with a device.  We wanted to be sure we were talk­ing the learn­ing first, not about the device.  Our focus would be on the learn­ing process and how we would sup­port that through train­ing, pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment and teaching.

We went through a “Straw­man” exer­cise where we looked at three options for our pro­gram before mak­ing our choice: stan­dard­ized, a min­i­mum sys­tem con­fig­u­ra­tion and a BYOD approach.  We used this approach to play out each of the sce­nar­ios for these three pro­gram options, even­tu­ally adopt­ing a stan­dard­ized model.

We were very delib­er­ate in how we talked about the pro­gram, refer­ring to it as our 1:1 Learn­ing Initiative.

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[UPDATED — 1/26/2012]

There is doing some­thing and doing some­thing right.

When you take on any project, par­tic­u­larly one effect­ing 1000+ peo­ple you bet­ter make sure you’re doing it as right as possible.

My school is a year and a half into our 1:1 Ini­tia­tive.  We pro­vided every fac­ulty mem­ber and stu­dent (grades 4–12) with a Mac­book Pro com­puter and a 500GB hard drive for TimeMa­chine back­ups.  Every­one is an admin­is­tra­tor on their own machine — which as one of my techs (@damienbarrett) will always point out to me is part of the prob­lem.  We don’t let stu­dent plug their machines into power while in the class­room (not enough out­lets & fire haz­ard) and require that they come to school with their machines fully charged each day, expect­ing that charge to last the entire day.  We also said that we would keep the machines as up-to-date as pos­si­ble with the lat­est OS and soft­ware.  As we want to have these machines be the users pri­mary device we want their access to the machine to be as close to 24/7/365 as possible.

To keep to those last goals of power expec­ta­tions, up-to-date OS and soft­ware, along with as close to 24/7/365 access as pos­si­ble we planned to spend two weeks replac­ing the bat­tery in every machine along with upgrade to OS from Snow Leop­ard to Lion.  We fig­ured we would be able to do this over a two-week period, doing a grade level per day (65–105 machine per day).

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NOTE: Orig­i­nally posted on the Edu­ca­tional Col­lab­o­ra­tors blog on 1/18/2012 — Update for Ultra­books below — 1/21/2012.

When you hear peo­ple talk­ing about a 1:1 pro­gram they could be talk­ing about a lot of dif­fer­ent things.

A few years ago what you’d hear peo­ple dis­cussing is lap­tops verse stylus-based tablets (“old school”) and whether do go Mac or PC.

Today’s con­ver­sa­tions includes the these things, plus: mod­els of own­er­ship and the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device or BYOT – Tech­nol­ogy) model, which includes a whole host of options; the type of device, includ­ing the “new school” tablets, the iPad and Android based devices; the addi­tion of Linux, Chrome and iOS in the OS debate.

All of these things are in addi­tion to the con­ver­sa­tions around learn­ing goals and the rea­sons for imple­ment­ing a 1:1 pro­gram.  These con­ver­sa­tions allow you to plan pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment and the infra­struc­ture pieces that need to be in place to sup­port any of the choices you make.

Let’s briefly look at each of these.

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