What I did on my Summer Vacation.

With sum­mer is offi­cially over I feel it’s about time for that recap every per­son has asked to write at some point in their lives… What I did on my Sum­mer Vacation.

While this isn’t nec­es­sar­ily going to be about what I did on my “vaca­tion”, it is explore what ended up being a very busy but pro­duc­tive sum­mer and three themes: engage­ment, pro­duc­tiv­ity and giv­ing back.

Let’s start with the truly fun stuff…

The Euro­pean Adven­ture, the MLB sta­dium tour and time on the beach.

The sum­mer began with the trip of a life­time for me, my wife, our two boys, my moth­ers, my sis­ter, her hus­band and three daugh­ter. We flew to Barcelona, Spain, boarded the Nor­we­gian Epic for a week­long cruise to Naples, Rome, Pisa, Cannes and Mar­seille. We then took and overnight train from Barcelona to Paris for three more day.

This trip was fol­lowed by mul­ti­ple days at the beach in both Ogun­quit, Maine and at the Jer­sey Shore in Mar­gate.

Between all of this we started what will be a multi-year project to visit every MLB park.  This year we man­aged to get to: Citi Field (Mets), Fen­way Park (Red Sox) and Cit­i­zens bank Park (Phillies).

It was truly amazing.

Dur­ing each part of these adven­tures I had my iPhone in hand, tak­ing pic­tures, checking-in and post­ing updates on Face­book.  My adven­tures were for all to see. Many of my friends and col­leagues would “Like” or com­ment on my var­i­ous posts and when I got back to see many of them we would instantly have some­thing to talk about.

We were engaged in con­ver­sa­tion from all that I shared.

Tech Insti­tute, the Lau­sanne Lap­top Insti­tute, the edSo­cial­Me­dia boot­camp at Derby Acad­emy and the Ever­note Trunk Conference.

The real start of the Sum­mer came at the end of the school year the annual “Tech Insti­tute”.  The name is mis­lead­ing as it is more about teach­ing and learn­ing and tech­nol­ogy infused as a tool. Since we are school the a 1:1 Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive, as opposed to a 1:1 Laptop/iPad — insert hard­ware type here — Pro­gram, may of the things we talk about is how teach­ing and learn­ing is effected by tech­nol­ogy and the 24/7 avail­abil­ity of infor­ma­tion and interactions.

This years goals were to look at “Oppor­tu­ni­ties for Engag­ing Learn­ers” and at “Learn­ing in a Par­tic­i­pa­tory Culture”.

When you have a pro­gram like ours and there in ubiq­ui­tous access to tech­nol­ogy, the Inter­net and all that these bring, you need to focus explic­itly on engage­ment and have stu­dent and teacher work­ing together and mak­ing good use of the tools at their disposal.

The biggest road­block to this is dis­trac­tion.  This comes about when peo­ple (stu­dents & teach­ers) become dis­en­gaged.  Dis­en­gage­ment has been going on in class­rooms since there were class­rooms.  The prob­lem is not new.  How­ever, if we are still deal­ing with it in the same ways we have before we won’t move for­ward. We need to look at the tools at our dis­posal, what could be seen as the tools of dis­trac­tion and lever­age them to make more engaged in our pro­duc­tiv­ity.

The one area that seems to get the most atten­tion when you look at dis­trac­tion is social media and this is an area where I spend a lot of my time both in and out of school.

I had two oppor­tu­ni­ties to talk about the social media this sum­mer and give back.  The first was at the at the Lau­sanne Lap­top Insti­tute where my school was this years spot­light and the sec­ond was at the edSo­cial­Me­dia (ESM) boot­camp at Derby Academy

We took a large cohort to the con­fer­ence where we present on a wide range of top­ics.  I had the oppor­tu­nity to speak about: Plan­ning and Deploy­ing a 1:1, Ever­note in Edu­ca­tion, a Prac­ti­tion­ers Panel, Best Prac­tices for Deploy­ment and Man­age­ment and Social Media in the Classroom.

Dr. David Korfhage (@drkorfhage) and I spoke about how you can lever­age social tools such as Twit­ter, Face­book and blog­ging (Word­Press) to pro­mote stu­dents as true authors.  By pro­vid­ing them with the abil­ity to lever­age these tools they would be able to reach and audi­ence like never before pos­si­ble in tra­di­tional brick and mor­tar classrooms.

This theme car­ried over to the keynote, dis­cussing and work that went on at the ESM boot­camp at Derby Acad­emy.

Here we spent time talk­ing about how teach­ers and schools can use social media in their class­room and as insti­tu­tion to engage and with their var­i­ous constituencies.

If you’ve spent any­time read­ing this blog you know that I spent a great deal of time talk­ing about Ever­note.  In August, Reshan Richards (@reshanrichards) and I had the oppor­tu­nity to speak at the Ever­note Trunk Con­fer­ence and a pre-conference ses­sion on the use of this tool in teach­ing and learning.

It was a great way to give back to edu­ca­tors in both a small (30 peo­ple) and large groups (300+ peo­ple) on how we’ve been able to use this amaz­ing tool to help stu­dents and teach­ers share and col­lab­o­rate, keep them­selves orga­nized and syn­the­size their work, pro­vide for assess­ment and make for more pro­duc­tiv­ity.

The Lap­top Insti­tute, ESM boot­camp and Ever­note Trunk Con­fer­ence pro­vided real oppor­tu­ni­ties to give back to those peo­ple who were in my posi­tion only a few years ago. This is one of the things I feel very strongly about and think that any good edu­ca­tor needs to do in what­ever way they can.

Down and dirty… Data, copiers and becom­ing EverTrue

While every­thing thing is as fun as you make it there are cer­tain things that require to roll up you sleeves and really dig into things… it also helps when you’ve got good peo­ple to help.

I have been work­ing on get­ting con­trol of data at our school.  This has been no small task and much like Ever­note is some­thing that I have spent some time writ­ing about.

We have the good for­tune of work­ing with peo­ple who really get what it means to use school data effec­tively, effi­ciently so that we can increase pro­duc­tiv­ity. Spend­ing a cou­ple of days with Ernest Koe (@ernestkoe) and Corn Walker (@cornwalker) from the Proof Group (@proofgroup) really paid off.

We are on a quest for the Holy Grail… a cen­tral­ize core of peo­ple were they then have a role in each of the related sys­tem.  Man­age a per­son once and have that infor­ma­tion flow to each sys­tem.  This may sound easy, but requires a very well-coordinated effort and the time we spent this sum­mer is get­ting us closer to com­plet­ing that journey.

With all of the focus on data there are the even­tual out­puts.  To this point those have been on paper and while it seems coun­ter­in­tu­itive we have put a new focus on copiers to actu­ally reduce the amount of paper we produce.

By bring­ing in units that allow more scan­ning options and plac­ing putting a new print man­age­ment sys­tem in place so we can focus on  pro­duc­tiv­ity while reduc­ing the amount of paper we are using as part of our sus­tain­abil­ity efforts.

Get­ting down and dirty doesn’t always have to be dif­fi­cult.  One of the ways in which we are look­ing to build engage­ment and give back is through a new mobile based appli­ca­tion we are devel­op­ing for our alumni with EverTrue.

We will be able to use this app to allow alums to con­nect with one another and the school, to com­ment on and update var­i­ous social media plat­forms and stay bet­ter informed.

For the rest of the year…

Now, unlike how most of these type of writ­ing assign­ments might have gone while you were in school, this is going to partly a guide to the types of things I plan on explor­ing through­out the course of the year.

Engage­ment, pro­duc­tiv­ity and giv­ing back where three of the themes that ran through my sum­mer. I will be tak­ing time to look at data more closely, the idea of sim­plic­ity through­out school and the sys­tems that drive them as well as the things were are doing as we look to refresh the tech­nol­ogy as part of out 1:1 Initiative.

Think about what you’re going to be doing this year and how you intent to share that with your team, you school and those that can gain from your knowledge.

How are you going to give back?