Classroom Videoconference with Smithsonian Museum Staff

If your school has videoconferencing capabilities the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum offers two interactive programs. To the Moon and Possibly to Mars, and Kites, Wings and Flying Things bring museum staff and docents, along with artifacts from the Smithsonian collection into the classroom by videoconference. Students interact with the presenters and learn by inquiry. Teachers must participate in a 30 minute pre-lesson video conference and you have to make your reservation at least one month in advance. You can learn more about the programs here.

Be Creative in Finding Stimulus Cash

Education Week's website has an article about different places to access stimulus money. You can read the article here.

The article mentions programs available through the Departments of Labor and Agriculture as well as Education. There are also dollars available through workforce training programs, "recovery zone" bonding programs, and other programs that creative district business managers and superintendents may be able to utilize.

Creative Ways to Fund Technology

While the stimulus package will provide billions in funding for technology in education it's always valuable to discover other sources of technology dollars.

Scholastic's website has an article titled 16 Surprising Ways to Fund Technology with sources and links included.

Number 2 talks about applying online for surplus federal computer equipment. The link in the article is dead but you can check out the new website for CFL (Computers for Learning) here.

Resources from Federal Agencies

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence or FREE is a government site that provides access to incredible information from dozens of federal agencies. There are over 1500 resources organized in four categories: Animations, primary documents, photos and video. The information comes from agencies as diverse as the Peace Corps and the National Security Agency.

One of the things I found at FREE was a link to ARC (Archival Research Catalog), the searchable database of the NARA(the National Archives and Records Administration). There are over 126,000 scanned digital images of important (and not so important) documents from the National Archives. It's a great place to find excellent source material for digital presentations, or just to look around.

How to Create a Community Website

A community website, or wiki is a place where people with similar interests can come together and contribute to a common website. Web design skills are not required thanks to simple push button input of links, pictures, articles etc.

Wetpaint is a site that enables you to set up your own wiki, about anything you want, at no cost.
Here's a video from CommonCraft that explains how it works.

More Resources for Teachers that want to Twitter

If you are a teacher that is considering using Twitter in the classroom or for professional networking you will benefit from visiting this next link. It's the Training and Resource Link page on Twitter for Teachers. It's the most comprehensive list of Twitter information that I've ever seen. Twitter for Teachers is a community collaboration website or wiki dedicated to teaching educators about the hows and whys of Twitter.

This excellent resource was built using wetpaint.com, which deserves a post of it's own.

Elementary School a Paragon of Technology in Education

I had the opportunity this morning to visit with Tim Lauer, Principal of Meriwether Lewis Elementary in Portland, Oregon and co-author of the book Bringing Children and the Internet Together. I had previously posted about Mr. Lauer with a link to an interview he had participated in for 21st Century Learning on EdTechTalk.com.

From the moment I entered their main office, Lewis Elementary stood out from the hundreds of schools that I have visited in the past. Visitors sign in on a laptop computer connected to a label printer that immediately spits out an adhesive visitor's badge printed with the person's name, along with the date and time of arrival.

As I had arrived my customary ten minutes early, I affixed my badge and had time to watch a photo slide show on a flat screen monitor mounted high on the wall outside of the main office. (see photo at bottom, far right) It was apparent before I even met with Mr. Lauer that I had arrived at a school that values the use of technology in many aspects of the elementary environment.

I sat down with Mr. Lauer in his office under the soft glow of his MacBook Pro displaying the most recent school newsletter. After a quick upload and print setup of said newsletter, we got down to discussing the ways that technology is utilized in his school.

Starting on the administrative side, Lewis Elementary uses an electronic attendance system that can produce a student's entire attendance history at the touch of a button. Mr. Lauer also utilizes Twitter (what's Twitter?) to stay in communication with staff and parents. He also uses his website as a place to keep notes about how technology can be used by students (and teachers) to further their understanding of their world. The school has also set up a Google Group to disseminate information about school happenings, as well as links to the electronic versions of all the school newsletters (cool to see the same, freshly posted, newsletter online that I saw on his laptop a couple of hours ago). Teachers are also given time "on the clock" to do class notes so students and parents can see homework assignments, announcements about field trips, and information about general class activities. Teachers are also taking advantage of iphoto '09 which, most impressively, allows teachers to sort their digital photos, by student, using the built-in facial recognition capabilities.

Students are also well served by technology at Lewis Elementary. Second graders are learning to play the piano using MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) keyboards (see photo at bottom, center) connected to computers in Lewis' computer lab (see photo at bottom, left). Third graders visit the computer lab for forty minutes twice a week, while fourth and fifth graders visit for forty minutes four times a week. They learn computer basics such as keyboarding, but also experiment with the digital arts including: Digital photography, video production, even musical scoring using Garage Band.

Music teacher Tony Jamesbarry is integral to the implementation of technology at Lewis. Not only within the musical applications previously mentioned, but architecturally he has students using Google Earth to choose a plot of land using satellite imagery and then Google SketchUp to draw a virtual 3D building on that land. We visited the computer lab as Mr. Jamesbarry had a class working on keyboarding skills with an interactive whiteboard up and waiting for the next lesson. Mr. Lauer pulled out his iPhone and showed me an application that he and Mr. Jamesbarry had discovered that allowed his phone to be used as a touch screen to remotely control the cursor on the whiteboard, wirelessly, from where we stood in the doorway of the lab. I believe I actually said, "Wow!".

But what I found to be most impressive about Mr. Lauer and Lewis Elementary was that they did not fall into the all-too-common trap of focusing on technology to the detriment of other programs. They have an amazing outdoor education center and learning garden, an instrumental music and band program, as well as an extensive visual arts program.

Here is a school that can be held as an example of how elementary schools can implement technology intelligently and thoughtfully. Meriwether Lewis Elementary is a model for how to utilize technology not as novelty, but as a useful resource for teaching, learning, and communication.