http://www.learning-blog.org/2006/11/07/nysais-edtech-2006/

The momentum is here — arvind and I have been discussing how to extend the 2006 NYSAIS Conference for Managers of Technology on our webcast this fall. I’m on the planning committee, and arvind is the blog manager (or blog master as I like to call him:D). With the help of our NYCIST FreeBSD Guru and a donated server, we’ve put up this Drupal site: http://www.nycist.net.

We’re pretty excited as we’re going to live webcast the main sessions of the conference and allow folks to chime in the chat room. We’re also asking that participants use del.icio.us and flickr to post links and photos with the NYSAISEdTech2006 tag. Folks can also blog using the Conference tag (NYSIASEdTech2006) and getting aggregated to our site (right navbar) or New York State area Educators and register and blog at the NYCIST.net web site. How’s that for the read/write web extended conference?

A year ago, I couldn’t webcast and didn’t know what del.icio.us was. Hopefully we’ll bring some of the other folks at this conference along for the ride. Then they can go back and bring their schools along. Very, very exciting.

We’ll be doing our final planning session tomorrow at 1:30pm EST at EdTechTalk.

Have a story you want to share? Something that will help our conference participants learn these new technologies? We’re already using some of the K-12 Online Conference posts to help folks along.

Let the conversation begin continue.

technorati tags:NYSAISEdTech2006, k12online06

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http://www.learning-blog.org/2006/11/17/faculty-technology-assessmen

I’m working on a technology self-assessment for our faculty. We’ve collected a number of surveys from the Independent School community and are using them as a base to create our own. I’ll publish that on the School Computing Wiki when it is done — hopefully by the end of the month.

Our assessment is surveying application skills: Wordprocessing, Spreadsheets, Presentation Software, E-mail, Internet, our Student Information System. Our next step is to use the NETS standards to give us real world examples of how to apply technology skills in the classroom. Once we have the results of our skills survey, we’ll offer 1 hour professional development sessions that are focused on applying technology skills for in the classroom.

It is my opinion that there need to be clear expectations on faculty that they keep up to date on current research on teaching and learning, and within that, there is an expectation that they know what technology is out there to use as a tool to enhance the learning in their classrooms. Our goals of these 1 hour sessions is to give them technology skills and a way to use technology to enhance the learning in their classrooms.

I would love to see how other folks are training and evaluating faculty. My feeling is that evaluation needs to be based upon faculty teaching and student learning. Within this evaluation of teaching and learning, tools such as textbooks, worksheets, technology, etc. are critical as they are tools to enable the best possible learning results for all students.

What do you think of this?

If you have good examples, add them to the School Computing Wiki - Teaching with Technology space.