How to Improve the Effectiveness and Visibility of Our Work

I've always agreed with the ideas expressed by our slogan, "Standardizing Services, Customizing Support." However, I would modify it by adding a third part: "Publicize Student Achievement." Our work would be more effective if our visibility was greater. Our visibility would increase if we could point to a variety of examples of student projects that demonstrate how our professional development has positively impacted student achievement.

This can be accomplished in several ways. Let's start with this offering:
Literacy / ELA and Social Studies: Enrich Exit Project Writing with
Technology ELA/Literacy and Social Studies teachers will discover how
to support their students in using technology to enhance the writing
component of exit projects. Participants explore the stages of the
writing process and learn how internet tools and advanced word
processing features can support collecting ideas and selecting topics
to capture in an electronic writer’s notebook.

Since we encourage student blogs and wikis during this workshop, I believe that we should provide webspace to host these blogs. The written component of exit projects is crucial. Why not present it online so that anyone can read it and post meaningful comments? We present ideas about how students can create digital documentary videos or podcasts about topics like global warming. Let's embed these videos and podcasts into the student blogs. Then we could invite school administrators, teachers, other students, parents and political leaders to read, view, listen to, or interact with these examples of student work, provide online feedback, peer editing, or follow-up suggestions. This would lead other schools to desire to replicate these digital projects, which in turn would increase enrollment in our professional development offerings.

Since we are, of course, part of the global community, our students could and should interact with students all over the world through audio or videoconferencing. Free programs like Skype or even webcam chatting have the potential to bridge cultural and national boundaries.

In addition to blogs and wikis, other Web 2.0 tools would further enhance our effectiveness. We offer monthly technology liaison meetings. Why not have a Google Doc where all of the liaisons can add suggestions about what we might cover at these meetings, which products or software they might have heard about but would like to see demonstrated, or better yet, post topics that they might want to present to their peers.