HO! HO! HO! Macbooks are Coming!

Apple Core Schools will be receiving their teacher Macbooks the weeks of December 3 and December 10! A firm schedule will be emailed to each School Technology Lead. School Technology Leads should receive hardware and have an internal process for assigning laptops to teachers.

It is critical that each School Technology Lead have a professional development plan of action. These PDPs should be sent to Terri and Dana by December 14. We will review them and help you make adjustments if necessary for a successful implementation. We will then post all PDPs on our blog so that we can learn from each other's experience.

We invite all APPLE CORE team members to begin blogging their experiences with us so that we can develop our virtual learning community. For those of you interested in learning to build your own blogs, email stahlmant@dreamsbeginhere.org to sign up for a two hour class with an exerienced blogger in January.

APPLE CORE PRINCIPAL TRAINING

Principal training is scheduled for December 10 and 11! Apple Core Principals should bring their new Macbooks to training at the Schultz Center for two fabulous days of exploration and creation! Be prepared for creating your school story in keynote complete with pictures. building iphoto albums of special school events, creatimg new and engaging newsletters, and even learning to make music with garageband! This new tool will empower principals to publish their thinking in quick, easy and innovative ways that will "wow" your readers. Mark your calendars and leave your cell phones at home! You are about to have the adventure of the year.

Apple Seeds Planted

Duval County Public Schools first "Apple Core" Cohort has taken root with the induction of new APPLE/MAC technology! Fourteen elementary schools are being retrofited with new power, wiring, hardware, software and applied professional development to engage, empower and educate the digital natives that enter our classrooms each day. This new cohort of teachers and administrators are learning to use their new Macbooks to enhance instructional delivery and impact through the ilife suite of software. After four days of professional development, participants including the CTO, were deployed to experiment with iphoto, imovie, garageband, idvd, keynote, and other publishing tools. This group of technology learning leaders will be responsible for building internal capacity at their work locations with a transfer of skills and knowledge to student engagement by the opening of the 2008 school year.

This initative is a new way of deploying schools for Duval County as we introduced the hardware and software before we completed the infrastructure work of pulling wires, adding power, installing servers, etc. This new deployment method gives us the advantage of a year of professional development on a new platform while weaning our users from their old hardware. The beauty of the Mac OSX is that our users will now have the capacity to be "bilingual" in two operating systems.

When the full deploment is complete over 12,500 students will be provided access to cutting edge technology solutions allowing them to "connect" to the global learning community of resources and social networking. The potential to change the way we engage students in learning is limitless.