A day of Learning with Burlington High School - New England 1:1 Summit

On Saturday, March 10th, Burlington High School hosted the New England  1:1 Summit.  I have been following Patrick Larkin, @bhsprincipal, the high school principal for a number of years on Twitter along with his blog.  Patrick has skyped into several of my graduate classes to share his experiences using Twitter as a professional development model and his district's vision for student learning.  I have always admired his passion for learning and sharing his experiences with others.  What was truly impressive was that Patrick was in Florida being recognized while the conference took place. His team of students, teachers, staff, and administrators came together to host an amazing event. He has a staff and team that share his vision, and provided an audience of 500 educators with a day of inspiration!

Burlington High School has a vision; give students what they need to participate in a 21st century educational system.  The day opened with student help desk members greeting educators. They modeled all the real life skills you would expect at a professional conference.  We started the day by using the QR code to scan the agenda.  Once in the auditorium we were met by a student DJ playing music and directing us to the conference hashtag #NE121. 

The BHS staff did an outstanding job presenting, collaborating and sharing their experiences.  The Superintendent, Dr. Eric Conti @ericconti, along with students, technology integration staff, and tech support hosted a wonderful day of learning.  Dr. Conti started and ended many sentences with, my job to support the district technology vision is "to stop staying no".   The audience appeared to love the comment as it was tweeted out throughout the day. I was most struck by the level of enthusiasm of the team.  The single most important thing that they hope to accomplish is to have students engaged in learning.


Many of the sessions focused on cloud computing and the tools used in conjunction with the ipad (Google Docs, Evernote, Dropbox, just to name a few) to support the shift in going paperless.  Another session had the Burlington High School Panel, where students shared their own experience with going 1:1.  The students created a genius bar along with apps modeling after the Apple Genius bar.  Go figure, making real world connections on their own! One of the students indicated that in the past, if he did not know an answer to a questions he was not able to participate, but with an ipad he had access to information at his fingertips.  The students talked about many of the tools they used in the classroom (Glogster, Dropbox, Evernote, Twitter, skype) and many more.  When asked about problems, some of the student indicated the filter/browser slowed thing down, and at times they had "app overload".  I found that amusing because at times I feel there is information and app overload.  

We were given two hours for lunch, which was provided by a local business, B.good barbeque style along with milkshakes.  I was joined my a colleague Craig Sheil @csheil and we decided to host an "app smackdown".  Along with 30 educators, we shared apps that we enjoyed using.  Some of the apps included HeyTell, Flipboard, Quick Graph, Peek, Zite, and Songify just to name a few. It's amazing how much you can learn from others.

After lunch I attended a session hosted by Apple and enjoyed hearing about many of the new tools I have been reading about online, ibooks author , a free new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for the iPad .  iBooks Author allows you to create great-looking books by adding text, shapes, charts, tables, and Multi-Touch widgets anywhere on the page.  This app will only run on a mac, but can then be uploaded to the new iTunes University as a book.  Apple also talked about textbook publishers books that are also available to purchase and download.

We closed the day back in the auditorium where Patrick joined via Skype with Dr. Conte and answered questions from the audience.  They discussed the iPad rollout, district funding models, and how the District Technology Plan is getting out of the business of saying no and saying yes. Also, Burlington will be working on creating curriculum textbook at the end of June with a workshop opened to all.

The session closed out with trivia and prizes awarded to members of the audience.  If you follow the conference twitter feed #ne121 you can see how much everyone enjoyed the day.

Again, many thanks for sharing you experiences and inspiring so many educators and schools!

Today 3/7/2012 is World Read Aloud Day #WRAD - What will you read?

Last year we joined many educators in World Read Aloud Day #WRAD and we were very excited to participate again this year!  Nashoba High School students took turns reading with elementary school students today.
We read online books and used skype to connect  our  students. (Books used: Insect Soup, Little Lost Dog and Little Pink Pup).  We also used twitter (@mmarotta, @tracylandry and nicoletomaselli) to showcase the pictures and links with other educators from around the world.

Both high school and elementary students had a great time reading to each other today.

Pinterest in Education

I noticed lots of people using Pinterest recently and thought I would look into ways it could be used in the classroom. Pinterest is an electronic bulletin board where users can “pin” images from around the web. These images are then categorized into various boards on the users’ profile. Pins are also shared and searchable, which makes Pinterest a wonderful resource for visual information. So what are these pin boards good for with regards to integrating them into the classroom? Pearson has come up with a list of four ways for teachers to use Pinterest:

1. Lesson Plans- As briefly mentioned above, Pinterest is a superb visual resource full of pictures, videos, and website links. You can search for pins with a specific theme or subject, i.e. “Periodic Table,” making it an ideal resource for teachers 
2. Sharing ideas- Pinterest is a social networking site that emphasizes interacting through interests and ideas. This makes it a perfect platform for sharing ideas with those who have a similar profession, trade, or hobby. For educators, Pinterest can be a great way to collaborate with teachers, parents, and students 
3. Organization- One of Pinterest’s most attractive qualities is its aid in organization. Instead of crowding your desktop with countless folders, you can pin your sources to classified boards that will display on your profile
4. Student Use- Pinterest can be a creative tool for students to use to organize resources for presentations, projects, essays, etc. If students are engaging in a group project, they can create a board for collaboration with their group members 

Link to tutorial


I am also exploring ways our journalism students may use in the classroom.
5 Ways Journalists Can Use Pinterest 

The Ultimate Guide to Pinterest (slideshare) 

Reinvention of the school textbook

I am listening to"The Digital Future Of Textbooks". The revolution brewing in your child’s backpack. One little computer tablet may soon replace all those big old textbooks.  This in conjunction with Apple's announcement this week with what it call the reinvention of the school textbook. A digital initiative involving its popular iPad devices, a new version of its iBooks ebook reader app that's optimized for iBooks textbooks, and a new iTunes U app that provides educators and students with everything they need to teach and take entire courses, respectively, using, of course, Apple's devices, here are the company's press releases (here and here).  It's interesting watching this transformation start to unfold.  I am planning on attending the New England 1:1 Summit at Burlington High School with Patrick Larkin on Saturday, March 10th 2012.  I am also encouraging members of my high school to attend the session to learn from Burlington's pilot program as they address the BYOD model. To sign up for the Summer go to  http://1to1summit.wordpress.com/ and to reserve tickets. I have already updated my phone with the new iTunes U app and plan on spending time this month exploring using some of the new tools, one being Inkling  textbooks for iPad that include interactive features.

iBooks 2. The latest version of Apple's iBooks app for iPad (and iPhone and iPod touch) features iBooks textbooks, which Apple describes as "an entirely new kind of textbook that's dynamic, engaging and truly interactive." Compared to regular paper books, iBooks are interactive, colorful, can include videos, and can be updated again and again. They don't weigh down a backpack as do heavy, normal books. 

Leading educational publishers including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson have pledged to deliver textbooks and other educational titles to the iBookstore, with most costing $14.99 or less. This, too, is an improvement over traditional textbooks, as any student or parent of a student can tell you: There's a huge market for used textbooks specifically for this reason.

The new iBooks 2 app is free and available today from the iTunes App Store.

iBooks Author video  Apple is additionally offering a free Mac application, from its Mac App Store, called iBooks Author. This allows you to create your own iBooks "textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books and more," according to Apple, and then publish them to the iBookstore. It's unclear at this time whether this will entail the same overly-strict and non-transparent policies as does the App Store, however. And I'm not yet sure how this is better/worse than similar self-publishing services from companies like Amazon.com.

iTunes U app. For the past few years, I've been talking up and recommending Apple's unique iTunes U service on the Windows Weekly podcast. There's simply nothing like it on rival devices, and if you're interested in essentially taking college classes for free--yes, really--you need to check it out. But now all of this content is available through a new iTunes U app--for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch--which is interesting. Looking at iTunes, i can see that the iTunes U content is still available normally--similarly to the way it provides podcasts--but I wonder if this is the first step in "locking" the iTunes content to iDevices. (Today, you can download an iTunes U audio or video class from iTunes but play it back on an Android or Windows Phone device if you want.)

According to Apple, the new app "lets teachers create and manage courses including essential components such as lectures, assignments, books, quizzes and syllabuses," assuming of course all their students have iOS devices. Students, meanwhile, can "access new books right from within the app, and any notes taken in iBooks are consolidated for easy reviewing. In addition to reading books, viewing presentations, lectures and assignment lists, students can receive push notifications so they always have the latest class information."

So, given this information, I would have to assume that the iTunes U app is for students actually taking the class, whereas the iTunes U service, through iTunes, is for anyone outside the school who wishes to enjoy the class separately. It will be interesting watching my own school district move forward with a BYOD model next fall.  I am hoping the textbook model is incorporated into the planning.

Professional Development options

I had the opportunity to present at the  2011 Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference this week.  I enjoyed attending the conference and following many of the great links and resources.  I plan to spend time this week and review all the great resources.  I am also planning on following the  2011 K12 Online Conference this week.  There are somany great presentations.   If you busy checkout many of the great teasers.

I came across an interesting article on Digital Learning Enrollment Triples: U.S. Department of Education.

Learning about the following this month:
Shell Center/MARS, University of Nottingham & UC Berkeley (math)

Common Core Curriculum and Massachusetts
Teacherdomain with Common Core
My Group Genius 

Common Core APP in itunes

Why present at a conference?

It's that time of year again when I find myself preparing to present at the 2011 Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference at the end of the month.  I am fortunate to present with my good friend and colleague, Nicole Tomaselli, we have been co-presenting since 2005 at this conference.  As I worked on my presentation, a few teachers mentioned to me they would love to present but it's so much work and asked me why I continued to present,

The answer, this is my professional development.  A time to reflect on the impact I had on teachers and students over the past year to plan several of my next projects.

As I updated my Web 2.0 Social Media Glogster poster from last year I added my blog post for my Skype Project World Read Aloud Day that I did with Nicole's studentes.  I also connected one of my special education classes with another group of students in a near by distict.  I found this project on twitter with a post from Angela Maiers.

I also plan on presenting on Classroom Collaboration Using Googles Apps for Education, based several projects that I did with teachers and students last year.

I am hoping that participants at this years conference not only attend the sessions but walk away and put into practice many of the great ways they can engage students in the classroom with Web 2.0 technologies and social media tools. 

Maybe some of the partcipants from last year will share a classroom success story based on inspiration from the previous year.