Moodling with Principals

I recently finished teaching a professional development course on using Moodle as a school principal. It was so exciting to watch the principals' faces light up as they thought about ideas to streamline their work week! Let me share some examples of ways that schools can use Moodle to organize staff correspondence throughout the year.

• Staff members have e-discussions through forums prior to a staff meeting. Staff members are able to share ideas, think through the different sides of an issue, and gain background knowledge prior to a face-to-face discussion.
• Building teams take meeting minutes on a wiki. The wiki is editable by other team members, and viewable by all members of the staff. Minutes are saved in one central location for the entire year.
• Principals poll teachers through the "choice" tool, instead of sending an email with voting buttons.
• Certificated staff members submit evaluation and goals paperwork through Moodle, where principals can track who has submitted work and when.
• School wide announcements are made through the "news forum." Announcements are then archived, searchable, and viewable by all staff members from one central location.

The list goes on! Using Moodle to organize staff meetings, team meetings, and building decision making can change the workflow in the building to become efficient, streamlined, and useful. What a great tool! For more information on using Moodle as a building or team leader, contact our department.

Supporting Students One Parent at a Time

On Wednesday evenings in the month of March you will find thirteen excited parents who have shown up for their computer class. Yep, you heard correctly. The parents show up for class, and most of the time they are early. With help from Clair Chean and Nina “Will” Williams, I am in the process of teaching a beginning computer skills class at the Kent School District Refugee Transition Center (RTC). These are the parents of Kent School District students, and all are refugees living in our community. The RTC staff strives to help refugee families with anything they need as they transition to life in the United States. This means anything from getting kids to school to finding work, or providing them with clothing, shoes, and food donations.

Many of these moms and dads have never touched a computer before this class. When I asked why they had chosen to come to our class, they responded with two simple answers: “We would like to know how to use the Internet,” and “we would like to help our children do well in school.” This has become our mission. We started out with basic computer vocabulary: monitor, mouse, keyboard, laptop, desktop. Next, we looked at the Internet. We shared what it is, what you can use it for, and explored the school district website. We also gave an overview of email, as many of the participants have never used it, but would like to. Tonight, we will set up email accounts and practice emailing one another. By the end of the month, we’d like to have opened up communication between these families and their students’ teachers. How great would that be? Connecting these families with schools is a really exciting way to indirectly impact the success of their students.

More later - I’m off to class!

To see a video about the RTC, click here.

Closing the Digital Divide

I once read a book of wisdom. It says to gain more wisdom, observe ants working. So, I did! I was astonished to see a multitude of ants working together carrying supplies to their destination. These ants seemed to know what they were doing. Their operation seemed organized. I wondered, “How do they know where to go, what to get, and who ordered their actions?” We have superiors who direct us. I kept watching to see if I could spot a leader. Sadly, I could not find one ant that led everyone in the mass.

Saturday, February 27, 2010, I got to observe another ant crowd. This time, they were ants from the Kent School District. They were our high school and middle school students working at the deployment of Bridging the Gap. These students distributed refurbished computers to 156 families, affecting 318 students in the Kent School District, who cannot afford to buy a home computer. Through the Kent School District Student Technology Educational Partnerships (STEP), we have 11 STEP student leaders who managed the deployment. At our planning meeting, prior to the deployment, I told them that they couldn’t do the job alone, they needed workers. I challenged each of them with the responsibility to recruit enough workers to work for them at the deployment. On the day of deployment, there were 54 student volunteers working under the direction of these STEP leaders to run a very smooth operation. They completed a day-long job in 4 hours from set-up to clean-up. It was amazing to watch them.

Students have power and talent to affect change, especially taking ownership of their own learning. They need opportunities, resources, and empowerment to make this happen. This is where teacher and administrators come in – to provide opportunities, to provide resources, and to emplower our students to change the world, one community at a time.

Students help make NCCE a success!

Last week, 47 TechYES Kent School District middle school students from Mill Creek, Meridian, Meeker, and Cedar Heights were part of the tech crew at NCCE, the Northwest Council of Computer Educators state conference. These students helped with video and audio production, technical support for attendees, geocaching events, and support for speakers.

The Kent School District also had eight students in the STEP program (Student Technology Educational Partnerships) spend time throughout the week filming and editing video footage for the conference. NCCE asked for a video to be produced that would capture the spirit of Seattle and the energy of the conference to be shown during the closing keynote.

As always, the video turned out to be amazing!



If you do not have access to YouTube, you can view this video by clicking here.

A Great Reason for a Kindle

Let me just start by saying that I love my Kindle. I own shelves and shelves of books, but I actually prefer reading on my Kindle now. But this isn't a review, it's a story...

When I was visiting my brother's family, I was helping my nine-year-old niece with some homework. One of her assignments was to read one chapter from her book aloud. I agreed to listen to her read, and here's where things got interesting.

"Hm, where is my book?" she began. (Uh-oh, I thought.) "Mom? Where's my reading book?" And a search ensued. Ten minutes later, no one could find the book. (Has this ever happened at your house?)

"What book are you reading?" I asked.

"Little Women," she answered.

Ah, I thought. I bet Little Women is a free download on my Kindle, since many classics are.

In less than a minute (and I'm not kidding here), Little Women was sitting in front of me, ready to read. I called my niece over and asked if she wanted to stop looking for her book and just read it on my Kindle. Of course, she said yes.

We used the chapter navigation to skip ahead to where she left off in her paperback, and we were off. But there's more to the story! Soon enough, she stumbled over a word. "What's that?" she asked. Instead of answering, I showed her how to move the cursor next to the word and look at the definition at the bottom of the screen. From then on, she viewed definitions for a few more words that she was stuck on: without having to get up and find a dictionary (which, realistically, she wouldn't have done anyway). We came to one word in which the definition did not fit the context of the sentence. She noticed and wondered if the definition was wrong. So I showed her how to press the enter key to read more definitions, and we found one that made sense. Two clicks later, she was back to reading, with complete understanding of the metaphor.

Wow. My niece even changed the text size so it would be a little easier to read and changed it back when she was done. We didn't take notes, make bookmarks, or highlight anything... but I think we will next time.