This will enable us as a school to better monitor student activity and help guide appropriate student behavior while the students are on campus through Apple Remote Desktop. They have been informed: If a student changes their settings it will be considered a discipline issue.

You see, we gave our students administrative rights to their machines. With administrative rights, the students can install programs they may need, update their software on their own (so very important), and really make this dynamic learning tool their own.

We are in our second month of our 1:1 laptop program and it’s going very well. Teachers are modifying the way they teach and following many of the recommendations they received during their Out in Shanghai days training. And as Jason Ohler found in his most recent research, the student engagement in educational activities is through the roof. Quite frankly, students don’t have time to get into trouble with their computers while in the classrooms.

So why are we as a school doing this? I am still trying to come up to the answer to this question and I’ll diligently gather my research over the coming months. The jury is still out for me though. I don’t want this to be a “gotcha” program because I think that without student input it could erode the positive culture and relationship that currently exists between teachers and students. However, I am not ignorant and I know that there is always one… one student that cyber-bullies another without an adult knowing about it… one student that secretly chats with a friend back home on Facebook while she should be working on her talking worksheet in science class… one student that skips lunch to play Halo on a regular basis, avoiding conversation with friends and exercise for the soul.

This has been cross posted on Some Tech Sense.

David Gran and Mikey McKillip open S2F2

After months of planning, the Shanghai Student Film Festival proved to be one of the most rewarding experiences of this teacher’s career.

Why?

The number of students from international schools across Shanghai and across the world that were able to participate and be a part of this event were inspiring to me. Elementary students, middle school, high school… all were represented and each and every one of them brought something unique to the festival. From the gregarious student to the shy student, many students were able to explore learning 21st century style by telling stories using film as the medium. As Scott McCloud mentioned in his opening S2F2 speech, films are still a relatively new medium and the potential to discover new things using film is great indeed.

Sky McCloud joins Shanghai students in the workshops

At my school, we had a quarter long elective class every other day to expose kids more in depth to art of film making. Kids made short films in this class, but what I find surprising (and encouraging) is that students submitted films that were either made on their own time OR that were created within the classroom to share their learning. Is this not

Shanghai students celebrate their success

fantastic?? As educators, this is what we want for our students… embedded technology and authentic uses of technology. Just another reason every school school have a tech integrationist….

If you are thinking of starting a film festival in your neck of the woods, I want to share with you something that made our event this year even more special. Students who submitted films from all over Shanghai were invited to our school for the day so that they could attend a mini-conference just for them. They signed up using a google form ahead of time which helped us organize the event. Over 100 students attended interactive workshop sessions about:

• animation
• green screening
• acting in filM
• using Foley for sound

If you have questions about staring a film festival in your area, please contact us as we’re more than willing to help out. Tim Bray has the Phoenix Film Festival coming up at the end of April as well – we’re so excited to see film festivals growing in the region!

Students receive a free S2F2 t-shirt thanks to our sponsors

I’ve loved working with David Gran, Mikey McKillip, Jonathan Chambers and all of the others on the board for this event – remarkable educators. We’ll be presenting at the Apple Education Leadership Summit in Hong Kong (April 24-26) and we hope to see you there!

Please start a student film festival in your area…. start small and then watch it grow!

The big picture about our cart laptop program is that we’ve been able to achieve a lot of in a short amount of time across all disciplines in the middle school… must be the great software and the great technology integrationist!

This prezi presentation has given parents, board members, our superintendent, teachers and our students the knowledge that we use tech everyday across the board… at least that’s the feedback I’ve received so far. Just imagine what we’ll be able to do when every child has a laptop in every class!

I think that’s another prezi!

To view the entire presentation, click here!

I’ve always loved Wordle and I can’t help but love this too! It’s actually very timely as I prepare for my presentation to my staff about Developing a Personal Learning Network. Thanks to Langwitches for the connection to TwitterSheep!

Here is my word cloud created from the bios of my followers (@adecardy) on Twitter.

The interviews and creation of this was done in one hour – no fear. Just an idea and confidence to follow through… now that’s why I love being a teacher!

The product…

This has been cross-posted on Some Tech Sense

I have been so amazingly busy. I know, I know we are all busy, but this pace is incredible! Being a Technology Integration Specialist has given me the opportunity to have my hand in just about every nook and cranny of the entire school. As I’ve said before, this position is new at my school and when I took the job I was basically given a job description that said, “Go make tech work and build a program.” I was reading the Langwitches blog a couple of days ago and found the most perfect job description for what I do on a daily basis. That job description alone is giving me a framework in which to reflect on the daily occurrences involving tech at my school.

Today I hit every single piece of the pie!

• It started off with one to one professional development around the blogging platform for a few of my teachers. Four teachers were blogging last year and now we have all but four blogging – not once has administration said that teachers must blog. They blog because they want to do so.

• I was also a life-long learner after I planned with a 7th grade Humanities teacher. We (I) decided to use Photobooth to record Rome presentations only to discover after the fact that Photobooth flips the image so that all of the writing is backwards. MacForums to the rescue, I discover that you can use Quicktime Pro to flip the video horizontally. I taught the kids how to use Quicktime, taught them how to load it on our school portal and then embed it into their school blog.

• I also taught four 8th grade Science classes where I introduced all of the kids to their 8th grade wiki for their Environment Science NGO Project. Before I got them on the wiki though, I got them onto their school email account through our school portal because we’re trying to standardize all logins.

• I then met with two of my elective kids as they podcasted an interview with a teacher about our Movember – Save it or Shave it campaign. My wonderful colleague Simon Power is helping to orchestrate this fabulous event. We then interviewed the lead student actress of the MS Play and podcasted that interview. We hope to have all of this put together for our weekly student podcasts for the middle school. The kids have learned so much about GarageBand and sound boards… it’s time for them to fly!

So there friends. I reflected. I actually think this is something more like five blog posts in one, but my days are busy and I’m all over the place. I walk 13,000 steps a day and I team teach in every nook and cranny of the school.

I think I’m starting to make some sense of this!

Image: Technology Integration Facilitator

http://langwitches.org/blog/2008/11/23/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-technology-integration-facilitator/#comment-27692