Suzanne's Ed Tech Reflections

On Tuesday, March 20, representatives from Apple "officially" presented our Apple Distinguished Program Award for Project iAchieve at the Creighton School District Governing Board meeting. Five representatives from Apple were in attendance, including Apple Education Consultant, Dr. Dan McCormack. Dr. McCormack nominated Creighton's Project iAchieve for the award. We proudly join the 49 programs that have been given this award over the past 5 years. Dr. McCormack presented the award to our district superintendent, Dr. Boyle. We were honored to have Dr. McCormack attend the meeting to present the award but even more honored as we listened to his presentation documenting the success of our project. Three of our iAchieve classroom teachers were in attendance also and shared the posiitive influence iPods have had on students academic achievement and technology literacy. Several students wrote letters about how much they love having iPods. One of the students attend...

Last Friday I attended AzTEA's Ed Camp Unconference. So what is an unconference you ask? It is a participant driven conference with a specific theme or purpose - our was education technology, of course. The topics of the conference are determined and facilitated by the participants. Topics for this conference were generated ahead of time by the participants using online stickies with Lino It ( http://en.linoit.com/ ). The day of the unconference we voted on the topics we would most like to discuss and an agenda for the day was created. The structure was pretty informal with each session being facilitated by another attendee and participants were always encouraged to add to the discussion topics and share ideas and resources. It was interesting and informative and I did come away with some really great new resource ideas and coaching tips to share. Probably the best part was being able to reconnect with other educational technology specialists and coaches and hear all of the exc...

Over the past few weeks I have met with all of the iAchieve teachers for a middle of the year review of how things are progressing with the iPods during our second year of implementation. Some of the meetings have been one on one and some with the whole grade level group at a school. The conversations that have resulted from these meetings are awesome. The teachers seem to get excited and enjoy sharing their experiences both with me and each other. It has been very rewarding for me to have the opportunity to meet with them in a more relaxed atmosphere. I am really pumped to continue to research and locate effective resources for them, help with planning and implementing projects for 4th Quarter, and do some more coaching and modeling in the classrooms!