A Good Day in PA

Atlanta airport seems to have undergone some major face lift.  Marble floors, more upscale eateries, and cushy chairs at the gates.  Nice!  Still crowded, but nice!  I pulled out my laptop, and thought for a moment, “free WiFi?”  But no, your choice: Boing, Concourse, Sprint, Access, Opti-Fi, or T-Mobile, all for $7.95 for 24 hours. 

I really need one of those gadgets I can plug into my laptop and get broadband through the phone system, because it’s going to be a really bad day, when I spend 24 hours in an airport.

It was a good day, yesterday — a play day.  Breakfast was with several of the teachers who are members of this growing family of Classrooms for the Future (CFF) coaches.  They’ll be supporting the teachers in their home high schools, as the laptops appear on their students’ desks.  I kept asking, “why would you want to do this?”  I had my recorder, but never got enough time to record any of their answers.  I’ll be back there next week for the second wave and may get some conversations then.

Later on, I spent a couple of hours with Joe Brennan, who was teaching about video production to the second year coaches for Discovery Educator Network.  It was a good presentation, professional, and entertaining – how to make good video that tells stories well.  We got an assignment, four or five of us had to make a 90 second video of someone, at the door of their hotel room, when there’s a sudden spooky noise, and the door lock doesn’t work.  I contributed the sound affect from one of the ring tones on my new iPhone (more on that later).

Holly Jobe

Then I watched a great keynote by Jim Gates, which I wrote about earlier.  But the high point was getting to spend a few minutes with my friend, Kyle Peck.  Kyle was supposed to do his presentation, via iChat, but something wasn’t working right, so he hopped in his car and drove over.  We talked a bit about the findings from their first year of Classrooms for the Future, and I did record that part — coming up on Connected Learning at some point in the future.  I won’t go into details here, except that they were seeing surprising shifts in how teachers were teaching and students were learning, statistically significant data.  The surprise is that they have only had laptops in these classrooms for a few months.  He said that the coaches seemed to be the key.  Sounds an awful lot like what we’re learning about tech facilitators and the kinds of professional development that’s working here in North Carolina.

I also got to talk with Holly Jobe just before I had to head out to the airport.  Holly is the director (not sure about her title) of the project.  I hope to have time, next week, to do a proper interview.  She did say that from their experience, so far, with the project, the state department of education seems to have simply struck a match to a field of oil, that was just waiting to be lit.  These high school teachers seem ready to rethink and retool their classrooms. This is pretty exciting.