speak for the school and I assumed that if people were interested they could
dig further. Don Buckley, the tech director at the School at Columbia, is
very generous with his time and expertise, by the way.
That said, here's an inkling why I am impressed with this school... it
boils down to their constructivist view of teaching and the technological
infrastructure that has been custom built to support the needs of the school
community. THE, as it's commonly referred to, has an intranet complete with
media sharing (instead of YouTube, their video space is called THE Tube) and
social networking. It's also a 1 to 1 laptop school starting in second
grade. While I'm unsure at which grade level this starts, kids develop their
online identities with guidance from staff by creating their own social
networking profiles and avatars. Middle schoolers then go on to develop
similar profiles for historical figures. All of these profiles are tagged
with keywords and these keywords appear in a word cloud on the front page of
the social network space. Clicking on a keyword shows you various profiles
that are linked together by the concept, and it seems to really help kids
make connections.
The School also has started using Google Apps this year. Specifically, they
are using Google Sites for kids to write book reviews and work on various
projects. All of the content produced is tagged and searchable and this
makes it easy for others in the school community to find information. For
instance, if a kid wants to read a certain book, but needs more information,
they can search for the title and read what other kids have written about
the particular title. Student work is also organized by class year, so work
follows kids from grade to grade, creating a digital portfolio.
These are just a couple examples of what's going on at this school. For more
info, you can listen to this podcast from last year:
http://edtechtalk.com/node/3429
Hope this helps,
Lucy Gray
On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 7:13 AM, Backon, Joel <jbackon@choate.edu> wrote:
> Perhaps I'm asking for too much during the holiday season (my parents used
> to say that), but I've been waiting for somebody to answer Lisa's original
> question in its entirety. Thus far, I have seen some great new ideas for
> technology integration, and some that we already use at Choate. What I
> haven't seen is a response to the "wonderfully effective or
> innovative/paradigm shifting" portion of the question. I could certainly
> infer that these projects have improved teaching and learning or they would
> not be mentioned, but it would be fascinating to hear how that improvement
> has occurred.
>
> Happy holidays,
>
> Joel
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 3:43 PM, Lisa Pedicini
> > ><lpedicini@spenceschool.org>wrote:
>
> Which schools are doing wonderfully effective or innovative/paradigm
> shifting work with technology?
>
> --
> Joel Backon
> Director of Academic Technology / History
> Choate Rosemary Hall
> 333 Christian St.
> Wallingford, CT 06492
> 203-697-2514
>
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