In May, we announced that we would profile our 1000th Twitter follower in the June issue. And the winner is...
Easton Area School District, Easton, PA (about 9,100 K-12 students)
Director of Technology: Thomas Drago
District Technology Integration Specialists: Anne McEntire, Rosanne Manmiller, and Donna Kenlin
Five District-wide Technology Support
Classroom Technology Coordinators in each of ten school buildings
Student Technology Teams in each school building
Their story:
We began our transformation in Easton seven years ago by providing all school board members, administrators, and teachers in the Easton Area School District with Apple laptops to help them become more familiar with the technology. At the beginning of this laptop initiative, over 200 hours of ongoing technology training were provided in addition to training within the classroom by building technology coordinators. These twelve Classroom Technology Coordinators (CTCs) are also teachers that are familiar with the curriculum of each subject area, as well as the National Educational Technology Standards for Students. We feel that the initial burst of professional development along with the on-going support of the CTCs were the key to our successful laptop initiative in Easton.
Our six elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school in Easton are equipped with multiple mobile carts of Apple laptop computers complete with all software that motivates children to love to learn and grow..
Other current technology initiatives include the use of content management systems for teachers and students to communicate and collaborate throughout the curriculum. Our middle schools have managed this through StudyWiz, while Moodle is in full swing at our high school. This year we also began the use of mobile iPod labs in the classroom. Our success with Promethean interactive whiteboards has prompted us to expand the number of these throughout our district next year as well.
The future of EASD Technology is in cloud computing. We are testing out resources like Dropbox for file sharing and Twitter for distributing school district news, and expect these tools and more to spread like wildfire through our district in the coming years.
To celebrate our achievements of this school year, we had a district wide Technology Expo and Film Festival. See more at http://www.eastonsd.org/technology
We've quicky surpassed 1000 followers since this announcement, and the number grows every day. Follow us at techlearning.
