September DLIC Meeting Notes

Attending:  Bruce Silva, Lou Deloretto, Dr. Green, Sue Palmberg, Frank Krasicki, Tim Nolan

Topic 1: Digital Learning Inventory

There is no longer a need to update the smart board inventory or to worry about its classroom use - we have a good faith understanding that our teaching staff knows how to use the classroom technology.

We discussed the merits of understanding what is taking place in the classrooms this semester in terms of pedagogical planning and curriculum roll out (for January).  Bruce and Frank will develop a survey that will be distributed to the teaching staff.  The goal will be to aggregate those things that are of greatest interest and begin to promote them as central digital learning initiatives.

We talked about being proactive with budget considerations and foundation requests to front load and propel our most promising initiatives.  

SubTopic 1: BYOD Paradox

Dr. Green discussed the teacher's dilemma, they can't go digital until the students have devices.  

Frank has added an information page to this blog that informs parents of the January digital classroom transformation and it includes a rough guide about preparing the EO Smith student for participation.  All students and parents will be expected to participate.

Concurrently, some existing digital learning initiatives will get seeded with appropriate classroom loaner devices that can later be repurposed to serve as loaners to financially challenged students.

Topic 2: The Mobile Website Initiative

Bruce and Frank have located a programming resource who can begin developing a new mobile option for the school website.  Bruce followed up by contacting Orlando (our resource) and putting him in touch with Jan our school technology resource.

Topic 3: Rules of the Digital Highway

Principal Lou Deloretto discussed his belief that sufficient conversations are taking place with faculty and students as to BYOD expectations. Adding admonitions is not something he is advocating - this is something that will be played by ear and recalibrated as we go. 

Topic 4:  The Summer School Experience and Lessons Learned of Dr. Green's class

Dr. Green provided an educational post-mortem on a class he conducted this past summer that consisted of a flipped classroom approach.  His experiences provided a lively discussion about the issues that the rest of the staff will encounter as they go.  

This includes underestimating the digital learning curve that these new techniques require of students and how to correctly adjust the course content to compensate for the fact that students are learning not only content but how to navigate the digital classroom.  As more teachers and students try this, much of this learning curve is reduced considerably.

Another observation of interest is that we cannot expect all teachers to flip classrooms at once without some co-ordination to ensure that the students aren't expected to do nothing but watch instructional videos, one after another, contiguously every evening.  The online learning aspects of the flipped classrooms will have to be tempered by reasonable viewing cadences.

Subtopic 2: Class assignments on Moodle

Dr. Green's demonstration of the superior power of Moodle over EO Smith's current eBoard program stimulated an action item to pilot the broader use of this teaching tool  Bruce will be evaluating the potential to seed a twenty teacher pilot program in the near future.

Details will follow.

Our next meeting is scheduled for October 23 at 6:00 pm and will last approximately one-half hour.  Agenda tbd.