Local District 4 Instructional Technology News

Welcome to a new school year! Let’s have an exciting year of learning and innovation.

Table of Contents

1. Local District 4 Technology Leadership Meetings
2. LAUSD Updates
3. Professional Development
4. Grants
5. Tech Tools
6. BLC 07

Local District 4 Technology Leadership Meetings

Everyone is invited to our District 4 Technology Leadership Meetings. They will take place on the third Thursday of most every month, from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Here are the dates for the upcoming meetings, so you can mark your calendars accordingly.

September 20, 2007 – Local District 4 – 2rd Floor Conference Room 204
October 18, 2007
November 15, 2007
January 17, 2008
February 21, 2008
March 20, 2008
April 17, 2008
May 15. 2008

Our first meeting will take place in our Local District 4 office. We will meet on the second floor in conference room 204. Parking is available across the street from our Local District office. Contact me for the parking lot access code. If you would like to host any of the other meetings, please let me know as soon as possible. Here is the agenda for our first meeting:

Your participation is greatly appreciated. This is our opportunity to learn from each other and work together as a community of leaders for the benefit of our students.

LAUSD Updates

Student Email

The new LAUSD student email accounts are here! The new student email accounts will be known as mymail, mymail.lausd.net. The new email accounts, under the LAUSD domain are part of Google under the Google Apps for Education and include a variety of applications, including email, document/spreadsheet sharing, and calendar sharing. With student email accounts, students can engage in collaborative work with their peers and with their teacher. If you would like to learn more about this new set of tools, attend our upcoming September meeting. If you would like for me to provide professional development for your school or for an interested group of teachers in using these tools with students, please contact me at antonio.hernandez@lausd.net.

Student email accounts will not be given out unless a school has an email sub-administrator. The sub-administrator will be in charge of creating student email accounts for your school site. This individual must be designated by the principal. If your school already has a sub-administrator, they should be able to create accounts in the new system now. Here are the directions for designating a sub-administrator for your school:

• The first step in the process is to have your principal designate a school email sub-administrator. who will be responsible for creating and managing student accounts. Your principal can designate a school email sub-administrator by calling the ITD Service Desk (213-241-5200) and requesting that someone on his/her staff receive this type of access. In turn, the Service Desk will send a form to your principal for signatures. Once this form in submitted, the request is processed.
• Once a school email sub-administrator is established, then this person will receive a sub-admin account that will allow him/her to create individual accounts or request the batch creation of 50 accounts or more. They will also receive directions on how to create these two types of accounts.

Multimedia Cart

Good news for Elementary schools! The Federal Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) Grant will provide every elementary school with a Multimedia Cart. The cart will include an LCD projector, a laptop and a presentation cart. Each school must send a representative to attend a 3-hour workshop before receiving the equipment. See MEM-3913 (dated August 29, 2007) for more information. School representatives will need to register for this workshop through the Learning Zone.

MEM-3913

Grant Video Conference

A District-Wide Video Conference will take place on September 27, 2007 from 3:45 pm to 5:45 pm. Information will be shared on grants from the Riordan Foundation, NASA, Art Education, Physical Education and others. This conference will provide information on how to apply for these grants and what they entail. Teachers and administrators are welcome to attend this video-conference at any of the participating locations. The Local District 4 site will be at Allesandro Elementary. Download the flier and share it with others here.

Laptop/Desktop Recovery System

All computers purchased through LAUSD are equipped with a tracking system to recover stolen equipment. In order to keep the tracking system active, the computers must connect to the internet at least once a month. Please make sure your computers are turned on and are connected to the internet on a regular basis especially if you have mobile labs.

If a computer is stolen, it is no longer necessary to acquire a police report before reporting the computer to ITD. You must immediately report the theft to the ITD Service Desk, followed by school police. Reporting the theft as soon as possible will speed up the process in tracking the stolen computers. In order to pursue legal action, you will need to have a police report on file.

Professional Growth Opportunities

21st Century Learners Symposium

The Los Angeles County Office of Education will be offering a one day symposium at the Pasadena Convention Center on October 19, 2007. The event will run from 7:30 am to 2:30 pm. You will have the opportunity to see exhibits of innovative instructional technology tools and services, network with other technology leaders and participate in professional development sessions. The Keynote speaker for this event is none other than Alan November. Alan November is an innovative speaker on the use of technology in education. He is worth listening to!! Rigistration for this event can be done by calling the county office at (562)922-6216 or going online to the LACOE website.

CUELA Technology Fair 2007

Computer-Using Educators of Los Angeles (CUELA) is having their Technology Fair on November 3, 2007. Register now to participate in this outstanding tech fair. This year the Technology Fair will be held at Hawthorne School in Beverly Hills. Visit the CUELA website for registration and a for a detailed list of classes available. This years Keynote speaker will bu Chris Walsh from the Infinite Thinking Machine. Don’t miss out on this event!

CTAP Academies

CTAP Technology Academies are back. Local District 4 and 5 have scheduled various dates for these Academies. Participants must be off-track in order to sign up for these workshops. Each Academy is a week long. Teachers will learn how to integrate technology into the curriculum using the tools and software that is already at their disposal. Participants will receive materials and will be compensated $400 for attending. http://ctap.lacoe.edu/workshops/info.html?wid=387

U.P.D.A.T.E. Courses

LAUSD’s UPDATE offers face to face and online courses for salary points. These courses are offered free to LAUSD employees. Please visit LAUSD’s Learning Zone at http://lz.lausd.net Log in with your single sign-on identification and password (your email address without the @lausd.net and your same email password). Click on the “courses” tab, then select the “Class Offerings” link. Use the pull-down program menu to select UPDATE, then click “search”. Courses offered in the next three months will appear.

Grants

Best Buy

BestBuy Teach Awards. Applications are now available for the 2008 Best Buy Teach Awards, which award innovative use of technology in K-12 classrooms. Winners will be announced in February 2008, and eight $100,000 district-level awards will be announced in May 2008. All accredited, public and private nonprofit elementary, middle and secondary schools located within 50 miles of a U.S. Best Buy store are eligible.
Value: Eight awards of $100,000 each
Deadline: September 30, 2007

Tech Tools

Scratch

This summer while at the Building Learning Communities in Boston (tag: BLC 07), I was introduced to an amazing program from MIT. It is a free download for both Macs and PC’s. It is a program that allows students to use their creativity and imagination to construct projects. This software is from the same creators of Legos Mindstorms. Students can create animated projects with little to no programing skills. It allows users to share ideas and programming with a world wide community. If you would like to learn more about this project, listen to two excellent podcasts recorded of Dr. Mitch Resnick, the founder of this project.

• The first is from Dr. Reznick’s Keynote presentation at the Building Learning Communities, recorded by Bob Sprankle at Bit by Bit, Podcast #48.
• The second is a recording of Dr. Reznick, at NECC, recorded by Tim Wilson for Conference Connections, Mitchel Resnick: Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society

Google Earth

Google Earth has been around for a while and it just keeps getting better. Google Earth has been upgraded to include a flight simulator that allows you to fly from destination to destination. Google has also added a sky interface to study planets, constellations, and galaxies. Tis is a great tool to use for any subject matter. Your students can go on virtual field trips at any time of the year. Check out Google Lit Trips to see how teachers are using Google Earth with their students.

BLC 07

This summer I attended the Alan November conference, Building Learning Communities, in Boston (BLC 07). It is a great conference to attend if you ever get a chance to do it. This year there were a number of keynote speakers. I got to listen to Dr. Tim Tyson on the use of Web 2.0 tools in education, Professor Angela McFarlane on Online Communities, Dr. Mitchel Resnik on Tools for Creative Thinking (scratch), Dr. Yong Zhao on Digital Citizenship and of course Alan November on numerous topics including Webliteracy.

Every session was full of educators from around the world, sharing their experiences both good and bad. I had the opportunity to meet people from Africa, Ireland, New York, and many others. Each with the same goal, to build a community of learners through a Web 2.0 environment. While we are still struggling to get teachers to use their school e-mail account or to get teachers to use a simple program such as Power Point, the rest of the world is moving on. In just the East coast schools, for example, Power Point is considered “old tech.” These schools are using Blogs, podcast, Skype (for video conferencing), videos, and online communities to get involved in their learning. Students are working on meaningful projects. They are getting involved with their community and tackling real issues. There is a shift that must happen in the mind set of educators. We can provide schools with computers for every child, but unless there is a change on how to use technology efficiently in the classroom, then we are just providing schools with a really expensive pencil.

You can see images from this conference on www.flickr.com, keyword BLC 07.

My notes from BLC 07

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