New Job, New Ideas, New Possibilities

An article by TJ Houston    No Comments

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend the Apple Leadership Symposium in Columbus Ohio. The days events included what I would call a Keynote from Jon Corippo (@jcorippo). Jon is an Apple Distinguished Educator and he shared a lot of insight about reforming the way we think about education and he also showed some amazing work from Minarets High School students. Jon recommended some very good thoughts and ideas. I really like his way of starting out the school year.

Week 1 : No technology is deployed to students, meet all teachers and build culture around the school and how they want

After week 1, the whole school learns iMovie and than iWork. This gives both students and staff a great foundation of the tools right at the beginning of the year, this eliminates the need for technology classes because the 1:1 allows full integration of technology into the curriculum every day.

Jon also shared a really cool way to learn Keynote in which the instructions are within keynote, you can find that lesson here. This is a great way to introduce the concepts of keynote that is also appealing to the students.

One of the questions from the audience was “How do your teachers stay on top of all the different programs?” He said he assigns that to his students. For example Sumo paint, he would assign his students to write 1 paragraph about one of the tools or functions of the software. This is a great idea for crowd sourcing learning.

The 3rd thing I learned was a cool way of discipline that is exercised via Workgroup manager. At  Minarets High School Jon has 3 different “Groups”  a red group, a yellow group, and the green group. Each group has different “restrictions” on the computer.

For example:

• Green- Normal use, all installed applications launch, computer shuts off at midnight
• Yellow- Medium restrictions, i-Tunes restricted, computer shuts off at 10 PM instead of midnight
• Red- The computer can only navigate to certain websites

I will say I did get a lot from Jon today and I feel it will help me as an administrator as well as a future educator.

What reforms are you bringing to your school?

Thanks

TJ

No related posts.