Birds of a Feather Roundtable Sessions, Thursday, March 12, 2009

Thursday, March 12, 2009

RT-001 Web 2.0 Collaboration Tools in the K-12 Classroom

How can students' social networking habits and skills enhance their learning in the regular K-12 classroom?  What can educators do in the classroom to entice and inspire today's students?  Collaboration using today's emerging Web 2.0 technologies provides 21st Century opportunities for students to engage in real learning, share ideas with authentic audiences, sharpen composition and grammar skills, and allow for safe and restrictive use of the tools during the school day.  This round table discussion will provide opportunities for educators to examine the use of social networking tools, analyze their relevance and benefit, and identify ways for blending these resources into the classroom for communicating ideas and achieveing academic goals.

RT-002 Performance Based Tech Literacy: Letting the learning we want be the data we need

With 21st century learning in mind, many districts are turning toward more project- and performance-oriented ways to develop and assess K-8 student technology literacy.  Teachers and students are using formative assessments together to reflect on and guide thinking and learning.  Can summative assessments value and sustain – rather than discourage – this excellent classroom practice?  Participants are asked to share and discuss their experiences with models that are valid and scalable.

RT-003 Using Longitudinal Data for Continuous Improvement

Staff from the Data Quality Campaign will share how states are improving their capacity to collect, make available and use high-quality longitudinal education data. We also want to hear your stories about how you have used data and/or what data you need from your state education agency.

RT-004 Challenges & Solutions for Implementing Web 2.0

This roundtable will offer education professionals the opportunity to contribute thoughts, suggestions, ideas and tips for implementing Web 2.0 tools in the classroom.  Discussion will center on best practices and formulary tips for implementing tools such as blogs, wikis and social tools at various levels in education.

RT – 005 Best Practices for Online Learning Programs

During this roundtable national leaders in virtual schools will lead a discussion to identify key best practices in the implementation of a successful online learning program. Areas to be discussed include but are not limited to online curriculum acquisition, online instructional management, and overall program evaluation.

RT – 006 Empowering the 21st Century Leader

What is a 21st century superintendent? This discussion will highlight CoSN's Empowering the 21st Century Superintendent initiative to assist all district leadership teams, especially superintendents, in being effective technology leaders.  This initiative highlights five themes and action steps which originated from a variety of  conversations with leaders across the nation.  Topics were selected with high interest among other educators, parents, policymakers and the business community.  Participants will explore ways in which leaders need to Strengthen District Leadership and Communications, Raise the Bar with 21st Century Skills, Transform Pedagogy with Compelling Learning Environments, Support Professional Development and Communities of Practice, and Create Balanced Assessments.  Time will be allotted to reflect on each of these themes, provide specific examples from one's experiences, describe an ideal leader, and discuss web-based resources to assist in the development and ongoing pursuit of a 21st century leader

RT – 007 Using digital content to engage students

For participants to identify key best practices in the implementation of digital resources into their instructional practices.
While the use of blended learning, online learning, and 1:1 learning options for K-12 students continues to grow at a rapid pace, in too many schools students are still faced with a learning environment that pre-dates the computer and consists of traditional textbook/lecture learning.  As you move towards incorporate technology into instructional practices, and to transform the traditional classroom into engaging learning environment through the use of digital content, there are some universal best practices to consider when attempting such bold changes.    Your facilitator will lead a discussion on such topics as digital curriculum acquisition, providing support for teachers, and best practices for online and blended learning models.

RT – 008 Web 2.0 Learning – Creating Content and Functional Learning Mash-ups

Many school districts are finding that there are a vast array of learning applications and tools provided openly and by third-party vendors to support lesson and curriculum standards. However, seamless access to these learning applications and their integration/mash-up with a school or district’s portal or learning management system (LMS) is a challenge to providing an enhanced online learning environment for students and teachers.  This challenge is sometimes disruptive to the learning and administrative processes.  This session will explore the current Web 2.0 learning tools and applications of interest to K-12 and how they can be mashed-up in the LMS context.  We’ll also explore how these tools can and are being integrated with learning management systems to provide a seamless learning environment for students and faculty, enabling students with single sign-on to learning applications through LMS and portal systems.  Participants will be encouraged to share their specific and global challenges associated with integrating learning applications and learning management systems, and will also share industry solutions, such as interoperability standards, as well as school or district solutions.  This group will also identify what are the priority data to be captured by learning applications and reported back to the LMS to provide a more streamlined assessment of student learning.

RT – 009 Leveraging Priority 1 E-Rate Funding for IP Convergence in Your School

The Federal Communications Commission recently revised items eligible for E-Rate support. This year’s Eligible Services List includes interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. Until the 2007 funding year, the service — which enables users to make phone calls via the Internet — was not eligible for E-Rate discounts. Interconnected VoIP is defined as a service that (1) enables real-time, two-way voice communications; (2) requires a broadband connection from the user’s location; (3) requires Internet protocol compatible customer premises equipment (CPE); and (4) permits users generally to receive calls originating on the public switched telephone network and terminating calls on the public switched telephone network.

Verizon has decades of experience in assisting school districts in the deployment of well-developed technologies to meet the educational demands of today and tomorrow, and its subsidiary, Verizon Business, carries on that tradition by working with about 4,000 educational institutions across the nation. The company is seeing a demand for the delivery of next-generation educational networks and transition from legacy analog and Centrex systems to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems. By delivering new, innovative systems to support the next-generation services for teachers, school districts support the administrative, academic, distance learning and security applications of today and tomorrow.

RT – 010 Conscious Cost-Cutting District Decisions

Participants will discuss how to stretch dollars for energy, software, and computer break-fix operations by doing some very simple, easy to implement items over time.  The particular solutions implemented by an Atlanta area school district resulted in an immediate cost reduction of over $50K with the last rollout, and during the school year reduced costs by almost 10% of the technology services O&M budget.

RT – 012 Improving Data Quality Best Practices

K-12 school districts are under more scrutiny than ever before, obliged to demonstrate compliance with a raft of education policies concerning topics such as teacher credentialing, student discipline, dropout prevention, adequate yearly progress, and immunization requirements. Unfortunately, inaccurate and incomplete data reporting to state agencies can lead to lapses in funding, audits, sanctions and other penalties. This interactive session will focus on the important link between districts’ data quality practices and their ability to accurately report to state and federal agencies. Specific data areas will be discussed – and the root causes of what make them troublesome for districts to report on – with the sharing of ideas for finding time-saving, cost-effective data quality practices and technologies to ensure data integrity in these critical areas.

RT – 013 Using Social Media to Build Community Support for School Initiatives

Over the past few years, social media use has dramatically increased by teachers, parents, students and community members to share their ideas and concerns to a wide audience.  For districts to get the support they need from school stakeholders, particularly during tough economic times, schools must engage their audience where there are – online. In this roundtable, education leaders will learn the ways to use social strategies and tools to: 1) monitor and listen to online conversations about their district to gather information that can influence school policy, communications, student services, school programs, and more; 2) participate in online conversations in an authentic and meaningful way to build credibility and support; and 3) facilitate online conversations and collaboration to extend the school’s learning community on to the Web and boost involvement of students, staff, parents, local business and government leaders, and community members in the district. Roundtable attendees will see examples of social media use by schools, and participate in live demonstrations of popular Web 2.0 tools.  From this roundtable, participants will walk away with action steps for developing and implementing a social media plan that they can immediately apply in their school or district.

RT – 014 Using “Free” tools?  What are the privacy implications?

Increasingly nonprofit groups and companies have made available free software, templates, and tools for the K12 school and district.  But are school leaders aware of the way that data may be collected when teachers, schools or districts sign up for these tools?  What is the “cost” of free and when is it worth the price? Using the CoSN Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) concept, what are the costs associated with “free”? Participants will share district policies and standards for student safety, privacy and security that are expected from free products in their districts and what has been successful in implementing them. Cautions and guidelines from districts will be shared. In addition, industry standards for student protection, such as TRUSTe, will be explored as a possible way to help CTOs and CIOs in their work. In tight budgets, as leaders look for ways to cut costs, how does “free” figure into use of ed tech to positively impact student learning while not creating data security nightmares?

RT – 015 Web 2.0 Tools: We’ll discuss safety, benefits and district level implementations

Blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networking, instant messaging, and video sharing are now common place Web 2.0 tools used by nearly all students on a daily basis.  However, these tools are generally not accepted in the classroom.  Join us to discuss the educational benefits of these tools and learn how they can be used to positively impact our students.  We’ll address important safety and policy issues relating to these tools such as protection of personal data, cyber bullying and more.   In addition, we’ll cover these tools from a district IT perspective.   How do we support these applications?   Do we build our own servers to host these tools?  How do we create and maintain user accounts?  What role do the teachers play? Can we integrate these into a single sign-on system or portal?  Web 2.0 technologies have already made a profound impact on our society.  Lets harness these tools for the forces of educational “good.”

RT – 016 Security in Student Online Learning Environments: How Much is Enough?

The fear-based mentality applied to student computer use that is so prevalent in the US, has been harnessed by the press and district legal departments with a worse case scenario attitude since we brought the Internet into schools. Re-aligning that attitude with factual information and research-based data seems to be a necessary function in order to facilitate the online social, collaboration and communication skills and tools our students need for success.

What is the criteria for decision making and when is it based in reality, or not. Do we have a responsibility to bring theses tools to our students in order to guide their literacy and digital citizenship? Are the potential legal hazards or negative social scenarios great enough to outweigh our opportunity to instill positive habits and guide our student’s experience as they develop their digital identity?

RT – 017 Open Technologies: Open Source, Open Content, Open Standards

A chance to talk about Open Technologies and to answer questions and share best practices with the director of CoSn’s K-12 Open Technologies Initiatives.