More about the NSBA T & L Conference

I attended many sessions at the conference two on classroom walk throughs. One walk through used the FLIPvideo camera to record what the students were doind in the classroom during the walkthrough (the message being "It's not about teaching, it's about learning"). After the walkthrough the administrator emailed the three minute video to the teacher, the teacher viewed the video and completed a reflection sheet. After this the admin and teacher met to discuss the teachers reflections.
Another walk through session was on technology walk throughs. A team of three, a person from IT, a curriculum person and a tech trainer, visited classrooms looking for evidence of technology use. The used a scoring guide created by Bernajean Ported that rated technology use as Literacy (teaching technology skill), Adapting (using technology in place of traditional lessons) and transofrming (student centered, technology enables new learning). The observers use their cell phones to text their scoring guide to wiffiti.com. The results are exported to Google docs where they analyzed to drive decision of technology acquisition and staff development.