Technology in Action

The evening of September 14th, after the community meeting, the technology and education models committee met at Brian and Cyndi Fling’s business’ meeting room down in Fremont (thank you to PinchZoom for the space!).  The goal of the evening was to get a sense of the technology that the school does and needs to have – as well what the group’s role can be in helping understand and then share different education models are out there and finding success at teaching 21st century skills.  
 
With the help of David Elliott and Jeffrey Riley – we had a very productive meeting and came up with five key workstreams.  We invite members of the QAE community – current and future – to contact Suzi LeVine if you are interested in helping organize any of these.  As these sub-teams get going, they’ll connect back up with the broader community to invite them to participate where relevant (ie – when media (not the book) group meets, we’ll put it on the community calendar).
 
Here they are:
1)      Grown Up Field trips – The idea here is to put together 2 or 3 field trips for the teachers/staff and some of the parents from the school (one local and 2 internationally – or in other parts of the country) These would be visits to schools that are really pushing on this 21st century skills model .  Suzi to lead this workstream with Brian conceivably engaging funders.  Lauren also helping – on the local side.  Note – we’ll need lots of miles to subsidize the teacher/staff to go.
2)      “the nerd team” – this group would have a few roles/responsibilities:
a.       being the go to support for the teachers when they need help creating something on the computer (ie – creating or finding a template or creating a wiki – it may vary), setting something up or getting general support  for their technology (not necessarily crash recovery type of stuff though)
b.      Doing training with/for the teachers on technologies that they should know/could use
c.       Where possible - also coming in to teach/train the students.
d.      Who leading: Stephan, Brian, and Liz
3)      Knowledge base includes (but can expand) – creating/assembling the tech wish list from the teachers/staff; creating a repository where parents/community members can collect best practices for the staff to peruse; creating a place where the teachers can pose and get answers to their tech questions: Brian to help on the wiki; Jim Klockow to lead this section
4)      Tech and edu model reqs for physical vision for next year’s facility – Jim Anderson to work with Lauren Gums as well as the facilities committee on this – starting off with a meeting with the architect on what’s currently slated, what’s possible in the near term and what could be modeled for the longer term.
5)      Media club for the community – this group will facilitate lists/collections of books/ebooks/videos/articles for the community to consume and, once every other month (perhaps) come together in the library with really great wine and appetizers to discuss what was consumed.  First media recommended: Education Nation, Born Digital and a bunch of videos Liz and others have linked from the website.   Jeffrey and Suzi will lead this.
 
Please note – we need lots of others for each of these workstreams – so, again, email Suzi LeVine: suzid@hotmail.com – if you are interested in one/more of these responsibilities.
 
Next meeting(s): we will meet monthly and our next meeting will be on Monday, October 18th at 8pm at Brian and Cindy Fling’s space in Fremont: 707 N 35th St. Seattle, WA 98103.