A Giant Leap Forward

Yesterday, we received our first training in Google Docs.  Each teacher set up their own email account and their own homepage. 

The master plan is to have a Google homepage for our school and then using all the various dimensions of Google Docs, for teachers to build homepages for their classes where they can put their email addresses for students, lesson plans, calendars, and so on.  Under our own pages, we can add spots for student blogs and so on.  Here is my test page that I created yesterday.

It is going to be a phenomenal resource for our kids.  One thing that is going to totally change how we teach is the ability to sync mobile devices to our calendars.  That means students and parents can sync their smartphones to not only our school calendar, the activities calendar, the library calendar but also individual teachers calendars too.  So I can look on my BlackBerry and see that KoKo has to have Chapter 8 read by Friday.  Or that she will be leaving for the Magnet Arts trip on Thursday.

It's a flat world isn't it.  And LHS just hopped on board.

Now how will such a large staff as ours actually get to know how to use all of this technology.  That's the brilliant part.

What I love about LHS is our common prep schedule.  Every two weeks we meet with the other teachers during our specific prep hours (for me it's second block) for around an hour.  In the past this was initially introduced to help us learn how to teach reading strategies.  Then it was used as kind of a grab bag of technology related issues (I presented on using ComicLife, iPods, and Cell Phones) and then administrative issues.  Now, though, every common prep period is devoted to not only teaching us how to use Google Docs but then also showing others how we've implemented it in our classes.

Tell me how many schools can do that?  Or how many other teachers and administrators are still wondering what blogs and Twitter are?  And yes, our school webpage will have a live Twitter Feed.