I went to a workshop this morning. I’m part of the high school technology initiative in my district. This is the sixth year of the program. It was originally going to be a 3 year program, but they wrote another grant and got money to extend it. They started with 4th grade teachers and have worked their way up through the grade levels.
Each teacher gets a MacBook computer with an LCD projector for their use in the classroom. We have a variety of workshops that we can go to throughout the school year. We only have to go to two. We also meet with our technology coach for 3 separate 1 hour sessions. We attend a showcase in May and we also participate in an on-line forum and keep up some sort of site.
This is the coolest thing that I’ve done in several years. Yes, it’s very cool to get a laptop for free. (I can’t seem to stop using the word cool.) But the possibilities of learning and doing neat things in my classroom are so exciting! I want to take more than just the two required classes. We’ve got iPhoto, iMovie and a whole host of other programs that I have no clue how to operate on these things. There’s also subscriptions for online resources that the district has for our use that I’ve never looked at. I haven’t even mentioned that we can run it as a PC with Windows XP or as a Mac. I’m used to a PC. But there are so many cool things that can be done with a Mac that I want to get used to this in Mac mode.
There are 165 teachers participating in this program. The theory is that since they started this with 4th grade and worked their way up, we should be getting some of those kids whose teachers already went through the program. I have no idea if any of mine will have had exposure to it. But I can tell you that I’m going to take full advantage of what I can do with this!
