10 Blogs in 10 Days

Over the course of the past three weeks I have traveled quite a bit with my family.  We have spent a lot of time on the road driving.  A thought occurred to me as we were finishing our latest road trip yesterday.  As you are driving down the road you spend the vast majority of your time looking forward through the windshield (if you don’t you will certainly get into an accident).  A driver spends very little time looking in the rear-view mirror.  Although it is important to check the rear-view mirror from time to time, the most vital part of driving is looking forward through the windshield.  In other words you respect what is behind you (in the past) but you place your concentration and mental energy on what is coming in the future.  I hope this blog is a place where readers can sit beside me and view the wonderful opportunities the future holds for the school district. We respect what has happened in the past (and learn from it) but we do not use all of our energy viewing the past.  With that in mind, over the next 10 days I will blog about the “pilot programs” that the school district will be undertaking in the upcoming school year.  I have discussed these programs in a previous post, and will give you an update about the programs.  These programs revolve around providing the best instruction for our children in their classroom.  We call them pilot programs because we will spend time evaluating them on a small scale to determine whether or not they will be able to scale to the entire district.  We will learn what programs will help the district achieve our goals.

The Middle School Social Studies teachers are de-emphasizing the textbook this year.  In lieu of purchasing textbooks, this group of teachers will now use an IPad cart in each of their rooms to help provide great instruction.  The teachers were trained two weeks ago on how to incorporate the IPad into their instruction.  The training was phenomenal!  The teachers who participated in the training told me that it will change the way in which they instruct.  I sat in on some of the training and was amazed at how interactive the classroom can become with the use of the IPads.  Of course, the importance of the new technology (in this case the IPads) is how they will enhance the instruction in the classroom.  Based on conversations I had with the teachers at the training, I look forward to observing how they build lessons that engage students in their own learning by using the resources that are made available through the IPads.  The most innovative aspect that the teachers learned in the training was the use of QR codes in education.  I will discuss their use more after the teachers get a chance to use them in the classroom.