This will affect us. This does affect us.
Please, someone make a decision that we have to fund urban education adequately.
Practical Theory
A View From the Schoolhouse
SLA
A Moment of Reflection
We have to complete a School Improvement Plan for the city and state by October 13th. It’s a little tough because it is not a document that is meant for new schools, but we thought we’d take it as an opportunity to reexamine our plans through the lens of the SIP document.
So we started looking at all of the things we’ve been building over the past year of planning and now into implementation. I’m not sure this list will not mean as much outside of our staff model, but with every thing we’ve listed, there are hours of planning that have gone into it. But for us, listing everything up on this board and talking about how each of these ideas / features / concepts will enhance learning and further the SLA vision was a really amazing moment.
There was the moment when we stepped away from the whiteboard and really were amazed at what we’ve done so far.
Then, the moment passed, and we realized how much more work we have to do.
Broad SLA Features
Core values
Project-based inquiry & rubric-based assessment
Integrated curricula & EQs
Weekly PD
Community & national PD
Technology infusion (laptops & Moodle)
Understanding By Design curriculum design
Constructivism
Differentiated learning and co-teaching
Advisory program
Partnership w/ TFI & Drexel
Parental involvement & parent portal
Benchmark projects
Course-specific Features
Partnership w/ Horticultural (Science)
Partnership w/ Moore (Literacy)
Partnership w/ MIT (scratch)
Electives (interdisciplinary/core values)
Summer reading (Literacy)
Student-directed research
Capstone planning
Author chats
Guest-speaker program
21st Cent. Library & online database
Digital portfolio
Miscellaneous
After-school activities
Summer Institute
Reduced teacher load
Lower teacher/student ratio
Small school
CSAP
Distributed leadership
Searching for the Edu-Killer App
Wes Fryer and I happened to accidentally Skype each other today. (How many edu-techs does it take to learn Skype? Don’t ask…) But we took the opportunity to catch up and touch base, which is always fun. I was in the middle of banging my head against an Elgg install that was befuddling my sys admin and me. (It’s working now.)
But as we try to put together some of the pieces of the Moodle / Gallery / Elgg / SquirrelMail / etc… puzzle, a few things questions percolate
1) How can we create APIs for these amazing edu-web apps so that they talk to each other more easily — to wit, why can’t Moodle and Elgg share a user table? (and if anyone has done this, please let me know before we attempt to reinvent the wheel.)
2) Can Open Academic please hurry? ![":-)"]("http://practicaltheory.org/serendipity/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png")
3) We’re starting to build amazing course-management / student publisher tools, but where are the open source tools that allow schools to run more efficiently and how can they be integrated with the CMS / Content tools?
Nine years ago, I started writing the code for Beacon’s Web Portal. It was long on school community software and short on CMS stuff. But as it evolved, it allowed teachers to post homeworks, write web-based narrative reports, track student progress across multiple classes over a period of time, create lesson-plan databases, post course-descriptions and a few other nifty tools aside. Now, I’m enough of a hack programmer that it really is nearly impossible to strip out the "Beacon-ness" of that code to make it publishable and usable for others. (Although, any developers out there are more than welcome to try!) But it makes me sad that I haven’t seen open source developers try to create similar tools.
Now’s the time to bring it all together, I think. With the amazing work being on the course side with apps like Moodle and Elgg, with the imminent release (I hope!) of OpenAcademic, with SchoolTool hopefully on the way, we’re moving closer and closer to that KillerApp. Any developers out there want to work with SLA? We’re in.
(And if anyone knows of an easy way to port users from Moodle into Elgg, please let me know.)