21st Century High School Teacher Laptop Professional Development

Here is a link on www.MaineLearns.org about the State's plan to give all High School Teachers laptops and professional development. The purpose behind this is to help high schools in Maine have all students “career, college and citizenship ready” in the 21st Century. The teachers are getting MacBooks, with tons or great software on them. The high school teachers will also have access to StudyWiz. For those of you that don't know what StudyWiz is, think of Moodle, only cleaner looking, and a little bit easier for teachers to use. They also have NoteShare, DataStudio, and lots of other software. How with all of this effect that the state of Maine has put into this, let's hope that this will help enable the teachers to enable technology into the classroom, and help convince our government to start a MLTI program for all high school students like they do for our 7th and 8th grade students.

Student Technology Handbooks

Right now I'm working on handbooks for a school district to use for students and staff of using technology in the classroom. In my state all of the 7th and 8th graders have laptops. It's known as the Maine Learning Technology Initiative program or MLTI. In that grade it's great giving these kids technology, but it also can have some negative effects. I'm hoping that by making handbooks on what is expected, some great how to's and great ways to use the laptops at home, it will cut down on the some of the problems of the kids using the laptops as a distraction tool as opposed to a learning tool. If you have anything that you think would go great in here I'm all ears.