1-7-10+notes

NEISSC Technology Study Council January Meeting Notes Don Chase, Cheryl Shinabarger – Southwest Allen County · Assessments – NWEA along with Compass Learning which takes RIT and prescribes lessons; going to AIMSWeb for K-8; not happy with Vanderbuilt Probes, which are older and based on another state’s standards; HS using end of quarter assessments, primarily from texts · PD – had an in-service day this week that went very well. Taught some tech topics with internal staff. Don is using Camtasia to create some PD videos. Have had Atomic Learning for several years. Looking at Lynda.com for Adobe training materials. · Phone system finally settled; Cisco vendor CTI did good work for them. · Cheryl – the challenge with assessments is staff training, and their ability to meet the revealed student needs with appropriate teaching strategies. Adela Dickey – Northwest Allen County · Assessments – NWEA; Achievement Series in grades 6-12 for grading/analysis of teacher-created common assessments quarterly · PD – continuing to offer sessions in the summer, offered a lot of afterschool sessions in the fall, now about 2-3 sessions a month in the district training lab · Construction continuing at the HS, due to finish this summer. Converting from SASI to PowerSchool, will build schedules now for full implementation in August. Need to start looking at datawarehouse options since the existing TetraData warehouse will be broken when SASI leaves. May stay with TetraData but also considering whether this is a time to move. Susan Parker – Middlebury · Assessments – being worked on along with curriculum development cycle going on now. · PD - Professional Learning Communities are ramping up. Upper grades have a delayed start one day a week for collaboration. Elementary grades stay late one day. · Budget woes are high, with hits coming from several directions. Opened an alternative school recently. · What are your plans for allowing personal devices onto your network? Lisa Deutscher – Dekalb · Assessments – assessing their assessments this year. · PD – Primarily afterschool and summer training. Provide a stipend for summer training. Training on Inform next year. Have literacy and math coaches – some full time, some part time. Anne Plunkett – Whitley County · Assessments – NWEA and Compass Learning. Quarterly assessments created through CTB’s Classroom Manager (old). Moving to ExamView Learning Series. · PD – have some online Office training. Considering Race to the Top funds. · New Tech HS still moving forward. Sandy Schaufelberger - ACENet Cindy Cash – South Adams ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Assessments – Applied for mClass, but not sure how that will work since Palms are becoming unavailable. Using Accuity at middle school. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> PD –Teachers feel overwhelmed with training time in addition to figuring out the new school. How to Master is being used for anytime, anywhere training/reference. Tech Tuesdays highlight something informative. Moving to Office 2007 soon, so challenged to find time to train on that also. Stimulus money paid for some coaches for a year to help with transitions. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Now that construction is complete, things seem to be working well. Jennifer Nussbaum - Westview ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Assessments – mClass, DIBELs, mostly in Title I classes ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> PD – Went to Office 2007 this summer, provided stipends to teachers to attend training but only about 40 came. Struggling with morning or afterschool sessions – poor attendance. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Virtualizing servers and desktops. Putting projectors into classrooms. Dave Griffing, Doug Southworth – Baugo ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Assessments – NWEA ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Scrambling to find funding to keep projects going. Looking hard at mobility devices. Will rewrite curriculum for grades 4-6 to work around the iPod Touch for textbooks, etc. Will still use their regular computers and some books for reference. Plan to roll out for next fall. Perhaps a location for a visit next winter/spring to see their progress? Dave Van Lue – Wawasee ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Assessments – NWEA, Star Reading and Star Math in elem/middle. Looking into Inform to compile their data. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> PD - Using stimulus money to have teachers get additional training and use release time to coach colleagues. Bold teachers who are unafraid to go into others’ rooms and give advice were intentionally selected. Using Atomic Learning; getting ready to roll out a scavenger hunt to help them get back into the updated format. Technology coach paid from CPF to work with staff. Have Moodle site for teachers to get help. Build Your Own Curriculum recently purchased to allow collaboration on lesson plans with other teachers and others with the BYOC product. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Not expecting a severe impact from money crunches. NComputing installs are being successful. Experimenting with thin clients in the Resara labs. Tim Tahara – Concord ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Assessment Task Force from last school year started the process of looking closely at assessments to determine if the data being created was being used, or if the assessments measured skills that are still important. It was decided to give fewer NWEA assessments, primarily used now in the High Ability identification process. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Concord owns STI Assessment, but struggled to make use of the tests offline. Re-examining it for use online, especially for common grade level and course assessments. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> The process of curriculum mapping is underway to meet DOE requirements regarding AYP with Curriculum Mapper. The focus is on mathematics. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> PD – the most frequent topics for staff development sessions have been Data Teams, Marzano’s Instructional Strategies, district-wide literacy framework. Technology-based training has been smaller groups at the building level for just-in-time topics. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Budget – the challenge of building construction and renovation projects with no New Facility Appeal monies, and the Circuit Breaker impact are going to make the next couple years tough for technology budgets. We will be looking at ways to save money, including revisiting our Microsoft School License Agreement and virtual desktops. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Partnered with Elkhart Community Schools for their successful LTC Cadre 3 grant application. Going to add resources and PD for Junior High math department this round. Gary Bates – DOE ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Gary has been assembling resources over the years and has them linked on his site. He’ll send that link to us. He plans to move these to the Learning Connection at some point. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Learning Connection will be the place to get state delivered professional development, teacher collaboration on lesson plans, access to student data, and more. Districts will later be able to upload local student data like NWEA. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Learning Connection Executive Summary is a good read for details: []. James Rodman is the go-to DOE guy for Learning Connection questions. Sup’t needs to send a letter designating the district contact before student data access is allowed. The main contact will want to join the LC Administrator’s group to get info on how to use the site. ·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> WebEx for system admins on Jan 13 at 3:30. To attend: []