Edina Digital Age Learning

October 14th, I met with 52 parents and students at Valley View Middle School, where I presented our plan for year 2 of our "Go Wireless" laptop learning pilot. I've written before about our initiative and the ups and downs we have incurred, and as we move in to year two of the pilot we are looking at a " Bring Your Own Laptop " model. Go Wireless Update: Bring Your Own Laptop at Valley View on Prezi I shared details from our Frequently Asked Questions document , discussed what they could and should use the laptop for, and their responsibilities. After assisting students with connecting to the network, I had them complete a short survey to gather some data on their hopes and dreams for using their personal laptop at school. Parents and students asked some great questions about when they could use the laptop, whether they could charge it in classrooms if need be, and whether they can use their laptop at home for Facebook or G-mail? (That's up to your par...

The fog is starting to clear! This week we continued on the journey of 1:1 learning with the imaging and testing of student laptops, delivery of teacher laptops, developing our "Driver's License" curriculum and training with the teachers involved in our pilot . The fact that this project is really going to happen is starting to hit home! In the training, we further clarified our timeline, reviewed and edited policies, settled on the " essential questions " of our student training, reviewed Google Apps and Moodle , and clarified our expectations of students and consequences for misuse. A lot to do, in 2 days! During an exercise in which I had the teachers explore some of the presentations from this year's Building Learning Communities Conference , science teacher Nicole Nuckley had this question: How do we balance the time it takes kids to learn the basic information about a subject (information already known and established) with the time we want to give th...