What I wish would have happened year one ….. I will make happen year two.

I am picking parents as my stakeholders. I really wish year one we would have done more to inform the parents of the ins and outs of the day to day life their students would be having with the ipads. I guess I do know why we didn't; nobody really had a good grasp on what that day to day was going to look like. We knew it was going to be different, challenging, and evolving, but we couldn't tell them because we didn't know ourselves. But now after year one I feel more confident that I can explain some key concepts and procedures to the parents.

1. Why are we doing this?
   We want our students to learn and possess 21^st century skills. I would start by saying there is nothing wrong with paper and pencil. We will still be using them, however we need to teach our students lessons beyond math, language arts, social studies and science, we need to teach them how to learn these disciplines while engaging in; creativity, critical thinking, problem- solving, communication, collaboration, digital citizenship and personal and social responsibility.

2. Speaking of 21^st century skills, your children already think this way in their personal lives, they go to Google with questions to find the answers in seconds. They will search youtube for a helpful how to video, or they will post a question to their friends on a number of social media sites. We need to use this inquisitiveness and teach them how to use it for their core academic topics. They need to learn to be critical of the responses they find to ensure their validity. They need to understand and guard against plagiarism.
   
   
3. For the next part of this program I would like to show some basics of the top programs the students will be using.
   1. Google Docs – How to log in, how to create a doc and share that doc. A quick demo in quick office for power point type of presentations.
   2. My Big Campus – How to log in, how to find the teacher's weekly agendas
   3. IXL – how to log in and what teacher expectations will be with this program.
   4. Acuity – How to log in, how to use this software as a study tool, how to read the reports.
   5. ibooks – how this app can be used to download books and PDFs that are viewable off line.
   6. ipad 101 – A demo of how to do a soft reset, how to hook up to home wifi, where the parent controls are – and just some general ipad care tips.

I believe that if I go through this informational meeting with parents they will feel informed and it will lessen their apprehension when it comes to having the ipads in their child's hands. I am hopeful that this will need snowball by word of month and I will be able to get more parents to show up for my second session. I also feel that it will take some pressure off of the teachers who may be meeting some resistance with parents who don't know how to help their child.

Effective Collaboration is the Key to Achieving Goals

21^st Century Skills

I can remember sitting down to have dinner with my Mom and Dad listening to my Dad tell stories about his work and the people he had to work with. Form an early age I was taught two things by this, “Life is not fair” and “You have to learn to work with people, even people you don't like.” So I have to pick Collaboration as by 2st Century most important skill. This skill is the most important to me because we are social beings. No matter if it is play or work we have to interact with other people. There are countless examples of group projects, starting in elementary school where we have to learn to do our share and to bring out the best in our partners, this is sometimes easier said than done. We are on sports teams, where the hope is that you play well as a team to achieve your goals of winning it all. These are just a few examples of how collaboration is a life skill we use everyday of our lives, to enhance our lives.

In my early stages of thought about my Technology Infusion Plan, I see collaboration as a huge key. I need to collaborate with our staff on many levels. I first need to get them vested in a Google PD so they will be comfortable using the Google Drive format with their students. This would set up a classroom of Collaboration between students and teachers and students and students monitored by the teacher. I then need to collaborate with the teachers on classroom presentations. I want to be more involved in their planning. I want them to see me as a useful resource to take some of the time restraints off of them when planning, creating and implementing a technology based project or presentation.

This skill can be assessed by how many of the teachers I can persuade to get on board with the Google Drive format as a way of “running” their classrooms. I could also, create a survey at the end of the year to serve as a climate audit to measure the teachers feelings of how successful the collaboration in their classroom was during the year.