NSBA: Educational Cathedrals

Educational Cathedrals and Flying Machines with Michael Jay, Educational Systemics

This talk is about how we adapt the educational environment to meet the needs of our students in an environment of rapid technological change. What’s an educational cathedral? It includes the physical design and the resources we use. The structure dictates the kinds of learning that take place in important ways. The presenter is talking about instructional, technological, and pedagogical implications of the educational environment.

The speaker recommends NetTrekker as a tool for students to use to search the Web instead of the Google, for example, which doesn’t have the ability to filter by reading level or educational appropriateness. He also recommends Soliloquy Learning, a product that uses speech recognition to help students learn to read.

He’s talking now about the need for new systems that can aggregate information about learners to get a sense of that the whole person. Your students might be using a reading system, for example, but it’s unlikely that those data base available to the other systems that might be in use in your school.

Are eBooks part of the answer? He’s sharing some of the many limitations of a traditional textbook such as their increasing weight, lack of full search, and the impossibility of keeping them up to date. eBook technology is improving rapidly and may solve many of these issues. eBooks can be highlighted, searched, and can even include simulations and other more interactive elements. The reader that the presenters uses costs about $300.

Now we’ve switched to presentation about SIF, the Schools Interoperability Framework. I wondered if we’d get to that since he was talking about interoperability early on. We just signed on with Infinite Campus as our new Student Information System, and part of the reason (not a deciding part) was that Infinite Campus has good SIF support. This is a pretty big deal, and all school technology leaders should spend some time to get up to speed on what SIF does.

Finally, he’s talking about two other tools: SchoolNet looks like a student information system with some curriculum mapping and assessment features and a healthy dose of data-driven decision making. ClassLink is similar and includes a rubric builder, links to educational standards, lesson planning resources, for example.

Check the presenter’s Web site for many links and other information related to this talk.