Classrooms for the Future comes to New Hope

It's been quite awhile since I've posted in my blog...but for good reason! As the CFF coach for our high school, my time is now split between library media specialist and the CFF position. As our school gets ready to roll out 2 MacBook labs, I've been busy gathering resources, attending professional development workshops and preparing teachers for what is to come. On January 15, we had our first "Out-of-the Box" Apple training with Paul Tarantiles. Paul truly got us excited about how we can use this technology! Social networking, multimedia creations, immediate access to educational tools - soon our kids will be using all these great things in their classrooms.
Of course, many of these tools may be new to us, but are certainly not new to our students. A recent MacArthur study found that "learning today is becoming increasingly peer-based and networked, and this is important to consider as we begin to re-imagine education in the 21st century". It found that although students are very adept at socializing and navigating online and with digital tools, they have not successfully used all those tools in their learning. That's where we educators come in. We can learn from them so that they can better learn from us.