Instructional Technology Update- Andover High School-Grades 6-12 Daniel Downs Week of October 6th-10th 2014

This week began with a tour of Andover High School for a group of  Dutch Superintendents who visited to see how we currently integrate technology within our school. We were able we were able to make a video of their tour with a variety of different classrooms using technology. We  stopped in to the special education rooms, language lab as well as the programming courses labs. Dan Brennan the Media/Video also gave a first hand tour of the Andover Tv Studio. I was able to provide a detailed description of the work students do at the innovation lab and help desk for our visitors as well.
Their tour concluded with a question and answer session with the entire faculty at the end of the day. They also gave out of the gift of the book The UnDutchables to Dr Lord and others who were on the tour. This was a great opportunity to share     our perspectives on technology in education.

This week I had the opportunity to work with Isa Perez in the World Language department to have an overview of Google Classroom and how she could use it with her students. We also went over the process of adding new page, re-sizing images and content for those pages.  As you can see from the photo of her Google site her page looks great and she is excited to add a calendar for her students as well.



Also in the World Language Department Diana Zawil has been using a variety of great tools to integrate technology into her courses. She is using the cartoon creator http://www.bitstrips.com/
to make cartoons of herself and others to explain language learning opportunities.

She is also using QR codes with her students to quickly get them engaged with content driven language games that she can use to track their vocabulary growth in Spanish. The use of QR codes is growing as creating these codes is easy and can take students to web links,text,images and a variety of other web based content.

I am very impressed with how Diana has integrated these tools and it expands on her ever growing knowledge of the use of technology in the foreign language classroom.

Students in the Innovation Lab have begun working development of tools to assist with learning a Google Sites for teachers.

We also received our t shirts and banner for the library. The banner will hang on the back wall of the library and also be a backdrop for videos and also go along with us to a field trips and other presentations of the students plan on making of the next several months.
Our Blog:
http://bit.ly/andoverinnovation



It's great to finally have something to help us identify ourselves in the library we also have the opportunity to interview process Alicia a student who was part of last year's help desk to be in our promotional video.

At the end of the day on Friday I assisted Dr. Lord with adding a video from his phone straight to his blog to share out with parents. Dr.Lord does a great job of sharing out his experiences from the week on his Principals blog every Friday.
Find his blog here:
http://drchristopherlordblog.blogspot.com/

On Friday I have the opportunity to work with Assistant Principal John Norton to assist a student with a broken his hand to take notes for his classes with Evernote.
Find Evernote here:
https://evernote.com/

I appreciate John Norton pulling me aside  and having the opportunity to work with the student.
It was great to be able to review the benefits of Evernote and how the company has added many new sharing features including the sharing and multiple notebooks.


A great tool I would like to share out this week is the the Cloudconvert Google Chrome App.
Find it here:
https://cloudconvert.org/

This app works within the Chrome Browser and enables you to take video files of a variety of formats convert them to your choice of format(avi,mp4,mkv) and reuploads them automatically back to your Google Drive. The process really is seamless and saves many conversion steps. This is great for sharing online video in a variety of formats.

Instructional Technology and Digital Learning At Andover High School February 10th-14th 2014 - Daniel Downs

Even with a shortened week we were busy making connections and creating new experiences in the Innovation Lab and Instructional technology at Andover High School.

Marketing teacher Karen Stevens started a new semester integrating the web based timeline creator Dipity.com into her courses. This website enables students to create web based presentations in which students upload images,write copy and organized dates into nice graphic timelines.

Mrs.Stevens carefully constructs the lesson by having students develop their ideas and find the images before she introduces the tool. This enables students to have an organized workflow and focus on using the technology without the need to do more research. The students find the timeline creation engaging and enables them to make a variety of connections with events.

View my tutorial on the use of this tool that I created to assist with teachers who want to integrate it.

Beginning With Dipity Part 1

A representative from Burlington High School was on campus to train members of the Digital Learning team and Social Studies teacher Michelle Chaccus with the Ipad application “Net Texts”. This is an application which will allow access to more easily develop lessons and units using “Open Educational Ressources”  often called OER. We expect over the next couple months to support the implementation of this application to better support the use of IPads in the classroom.

On Monday the members of Students government met in the Andover Innovation lab with Dustin Luca from the Andover Townsman to do an article. He was able to get a variety of perspectives on the benefits of the Innovation lab. On Friday he returned to take some photos and meet the students involved in the help desk. We are expecting the article to be on the February 27th edition of the Townsman.

On Tuesday I had the opportunity to assist Tom Powers with the integration of Google Groups into the classroom. He plans on using the web based tool to create web forums for the sharing of documents and written dialogue in his Spanish classroom.  Students immediately accessed the class group and could send a sample reply within the first class it was added. Google groups can enable the organized sharing of materials and responses to questions from the teacher,questions from eachother and a continual forum of responses to sustain engagement in and out of the classroom. Here is a view of a sample interface of Google Groups.

Parents night was on Wednesday and I met many supportive parents who I was able to provide even more background information about the development of the Andover Innovation Lab and help desk. Principal Chris Lord was also able to show me his results from the use of “Poll Everywhere” application which enables real world integration of polling of groups.

The results showed an intense interest in the “use of technology” at the high school which I am glad to see as a topic of interest and look forward to connecting with parents as  we move forward..

In preparation for parents night I worked with Tim VanWey of the Science department in sharing out the link to his presentation for parents which includes links for his contracts and introduction to the course material for the semester. Check this link to see his presentation and corresponding links. This presentation is a great way to share documents and introductory information.
Tim VanWey Science Curriculum Overview

On our snow day I introduced the staff via email the Chrome Apps Store to teachers. This is a deep and excitng teacher resource for a variety of subjects. There are foreign language resources for speaking and science tools with anatomy lessons and vocabulary. The Chrome App(Link Here) store also provides easier access to note taking tools and web based resources for productivity. 

Below is a list of a few of my favorites with descriptions.


This is the Chrome App which enables clipping and saving webpages as images right to your Google Drive. This icon goes right into the browser for snipping websites on the fly. Gives you a great opportunity to collect and organize your web searches as web images.








 The Evernote Web clipper snips webpages and saves them right into your Evernote Account.

  

Of course Evernote is also available as a Chrome App. Make it even easier to access by adding to your browser.











The UberConference is a great way to bring people together on the web. Invite people using their email or phone number and have an instant conference. Sets up quickly without hassle.

Instructional Technology Update Andover High School Week of January 27-January 31 2014 -Daniel Downs

This week at the Andover Innovation Lab & Help Desk we got off to a great start with the addition of 10 new students beginning projects using technology. The student projects range from learning Java, creating websites and also developing business plans for innovative products. In the next week we will be posting blog entries from the students describing their first week at the help desk/innovation lab.

Some of these students have been able to assist teachers in their role at the Innovation Lab/Help Desk  with a variety of technology. Students have assisted in setting up wireless projectors,adding email accounts to phones and downloading the Chrome browser on the new MacBooks.

Students at the Innovation Lab are also piloting the use of district based Google Drive accounts. Students in the lab will be urged to use these tools to assist in their research,share documents,videos,images. At the end of this semester we will ask students about their use of these tools and use their opinions to help develop a list of benefits these tools can bring to the district.

Photo:Help student Viabhav Patel installs PC for Innovation Lab students at help desk.

This week I worked with Adriana Gonzalez a teacher in the Foreign language department. I assisted Mrs. Gonzalez with creating shared Google Documents which contain her course homework. These documents enable real time updates of assignments and provides a consistent and reliable link for parents and students . Using a link shortener named Bit.ly we were able to also shorten the Google Links to personalize and shorten links. These links were then placed on the X2 portal.

Teachers are also beginning to use Google Groups to create collaborative web portals for students to ask questions,post comments and share acquired knowledge. The groups enable teachers to organize a collaborative web based environment on individual emails. Students and the teachers are sharing information simultaneously and are notified whenever someone adds to the discussion. These groups are widely used in higher education for collaboration I have included the link from Brown University who uses these groups consistently.

Link To Brown University Google Tools Site

Lauren Ream Social Studies teacher has ambitiously developed a blog to host her course materials this semester. Mrs.Ream has organized her course materials and hosted a variety of web based documents using Google Drive on her Blogger blog. Over the course of the semester she will have students commenting on discussions directly in class and will also enable students to share quickly and efficiently the course assignments and homework postings.

I was able to work within Mrs. Reams classroom this week and assist her with adding existing lessons and editing them to be posted on the blog. We also added students to become readers of her blog.  Her students blog posts engaged students with not only with learning technology skills but also improved engagement with her content. At the end of the class students could scroll through student responses and view a variety of opinions related to subject matter content. These changes will enable Mrs. Reams class to continue to develop  web based lessons and ready access to assessments.

In the coming weeks I will be offering out to teachers

more technology training after school to assist in understanding their MacBooks “System Preferences” and “Commonly Used Web Apps” such as Evernote and Skitch.

Additional training opportunity will include beginning teachers with Google Drive and Documents. I want to enable to teachers to improve their adaption of tools to their existing lessons and classroom environments.