Bring on BYOD!

Today in our ICT Lead Teacher workshop we talked BYOD.  Many schools are already taking this route and it's time for us to consider walking down this road too.  Whilst this is an exciting step to be contemplating, this is a huge undertaking with many considerations and possibilities.

The first thing to decide is the purpose of having BYOD in our school.  We came up with many ideas, including:

• Making ICT more accessible for the kids
• Increase the amount of technology without additional budget required
• It fits in with our ICT purpose of 21 century learning  (prepare students for learning and employment in the 2st century)
• Ideally 1:1 environment, though not necessarily possible in beginning stages
• Minimise physical barriers to writing
• Increased student engagement with learning
• Increased ability to share and receive feedback on learning
• Individualisation of learning
• Ability for continuation of learning at home
• Increased ability to connect with the wider community
• Flexible learning options for teaching and learning
• Integration of devices that students will encounter in life beyond the classroom
• A range of applications and learning tools
• Allows collaboration while at school and home

The big discussions included what device(s), which level(s) to include, trial or no trial?, consultation, security issues etc. There are many, many considerations that need to be discussed...Our next step....bring on a Working Group!

Very productive day...and a yummy lunch at Porthouse Grill to boot :)

Term 2 Lead Teacher Day

What a busy meeting today!

We started off the day discussing and deciding the norms for our group.   We talked about how we want to be treated and how we treat each other!  We came up with a solid set of norms that everyone is feeling happy about.  We have such a fantastic team, it is good to know that we can have open and honest dicussions and that we can trust and support each other because lets face it, sometimes this can be a difficult job.  







    

ICT Lead Teacher Day 14 February 2014

We have had a busy start to the year, especially for digital technologies in our school.

We are changing the platform for our e-portfolios to blogs this year.  Anna and I trialled this last year and we are now rolling this out to the whole school, therefore the day was based mainly on how we are going to support teachers in implementing blogs in their classes through a number of PLO's over this term.  We throughly planned the first PLO on Monday and have planned what we are going to focus on in the remaining PLO's.

We worked on transferring our school Writing and Reading Progressions into Google to enable them to be linked to the blogs and sites.  

It was a very productive day, we got a lot done and even managed to enjoy a lovely lunch at Portersteak Grill :)