ISTE Overload

Just recently I was able to attend the ISTE 2012 conference in San Diego from June 24-28. I was able to attend with several other PCSC teachers and administrators thanks to the several grants that Dan has written over the last few years. Lincoln teachers Paula Neidlinger and Bob Garrity also attended. The conference was outstanding and intimidating all at once. The general theme that I was able to take away from the conference was that we need to choose a couple of technology tools and develop our collective capacity with those tools before tackling even more. At such a conference it is easy to get distracted and lose FOCUS. The vendor room was HUGE with literally hundreds of companies trying to sell the answers to increased student achievement. (WOW the money that could be spent on these supposed answers) What gets monitored gets improved and we need to make sure we are monitoring 21st Century skills of everyone in our learning community. In this digital age, learning has changed and it will continue to change. Digital citizenship and helping our students develop global perspective will be challenges for us all. The conference helped us narrow our FOCUS some while at the same time emphasizing these two important areas for our learners. So you might ask: What will we being doing that is new? Nothing immediately besides emphasizing digital citizenship with all of our students and better utilizing some of our current digital tools such as Google Apps. I hope that everyone is enjoying their WARM/DRY summer. It was beautiful in San Diego but somewhat overwhelming. NOTE: This is my first attempt at blogging weekly. So stay tuned for more posts as we approach the end of our summer.