Web Tech - Mt. Washington Valley School to Career Partnership

Mount Washington Valley School to Career Partnership
"We’re not in the portal business, we’re in the business of making all the world’s information
accessible and useful." Eric Schmidt, CEO Google

Mount Washington Valley
School to Career
PO Box 1066
Conway, NH 03818

David Rudewick,
Executive Director
603-447-2350

Partnership Schools SAU 9 SAU 9 School Boards SAU 9 Personnel Conway
Kennett High School Kennett Middle School MWV Career & Technical Conway Elementary North Conway
John Fuller School Center Conway
Pine Tree School Bartlett
Josiah Bartlett School Jackson
Jackson Grammar School

SAU 13 Tamworth
K.A. Brett School Madison
Madison Elementary Freedom
Freedom Elementary

"This job shadow experience has made me more enthusiastic about my choice of a future career"

"Daniel Pink claims that the nature of the workplace is changing yet again, and that power will soon shift to people who have strong right-brain qualities (that is, aesthetics, feeling, and creativity).

According to Pink, the key to success lies in developing and cultivating six senses: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning.

In fact, Pink compares the Conceptual Age to past periods of intense change, such as the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. Can't get bigger than that."

Applications on the Web?

How about a spreadsheet?

Num Sum

Tech Summit: School to Career is planning on hosting a Tech Summit for all schools in SAU 9 and SAU 13. The key focus of the summit will be:

Meeting NH New Hampshire Ed 306.42 Standard (excerpts below)

All of the New Hampshire School Minimum Standards were updated and became effective 7/1/5.

(4) Use 21st century tools to develop technical proficiency at a foundational knowledge level in:
  a. Hardware;
  b. Software applications;
  c. Networks; and
  d. Elements of digital technology; and

Do we cover this in current curriculum?

(5) Create digital portfolios which:
  a. Address the following components:
    1. Basic operations and concepts;
    2. Social, ethical, and human issues;
    3. Technology productivity tools;
    4. Technology communications tools;
    5. Technology research tools; and
    6. Technology problem solving and decision-making tools;

b. Represent proficient, ethical, responsible use of 21st century tools within the context of the core subjects; and

  c. Include, at a minimum, such digital artifacts as:
    1. Standardized tests;
    2. Observation;
    3. Student work; and
    4. Comments describing a student’s reflection on his/her work.

1. Digital Portfolios: Can Career Crusing help schools meet the standard?
2. If there are gaps, what else do we need?

Additional Requirements:

(c) The local school board shall provide opportunities for students to complete a ½ credit ICT course prior to high school graduation, including, but not limited to:
    (1) Use of common productivity and web based software;
    (2) Use of a variety of multimedia software and equipment;
    (3) Configuring computers and basic network configurations; and
    (4) Applying programming concepts used in software development.

Recommended Reading:

Other Technology Issues:

Course Management / Homework Assignments: That's part of what Moodle does. Parents have requested an internet-based means of staying in the loop with their students courses and in particular their homework assignments.

Internet Equity: While the cost of dial-up internet access is below $10 per month, the average wages of many working Americans are declining when adjusted for rising energy, healthcare, and food costs. Our libraries are providing broadband access which is being taken advantage of extensively. We don't have recent data for the extent of household internet access, but it is incumbent on us to be vary concerned about creating a digital disadvantage.

Career Exploration Software: Some schools are using careercruising.com What are other schools using? Let's discuss this.

Library of Congress Webcasts

24x7 Schools - with inline support

What's Atom

Free Online Calendaring from Trumba

Modeling Technology

No Website Left Behind
One of our internal goals at MWV School to Career is to make efficient use of technology. Through this website and our related forparentssake.com we plan to model effective use of internet technology.

Career Cruising
Parents and school administrators on our board are raving about www.careercruising.com.

School Notes
School Notes creates a simple, free homwork posting and communication tool to facilitate a teacher-student-parent loop. www.schoolnotes.com

Content Management
We know that to earn traffic we must provide our consituents with fresh, relevant, intriguing, and useful website content. That will mean having a number of people contributing content that they will publish directly to the website.

The classic web rut is to spend money to have a nice website created and then watch it go stale, because no one updates it. Many types of Content Management software are available including Open Source versions. These allow trusted content editors to essentially copy and paste Word documents or create content pages online and publish them live without any web coding knowledge. If it's not easy it won't get done.

Online Curriculum
Curriculum Software such as Blackboard, which is used by schools including Georgetown University and our own Granite State College among hundreds of others, are becoming commonplace as a means of uniting an education community digitally. Open source software such as Moodle is free and is widely used. An MIT Computer Science graduate working at Gould Academy has offered to help install this if there is any interest.

MIT for FREE
MIT has recently made all course materials for a large number of its courses available FREE online. Their OpenCourseWare initiative reflects the very forward looking vision that knowledge should not be locked up and the internet helps make unlocking it possible.

Our Own Geek Squad
It may be possible in the future to develop a squad of techies who can assist schools with their web projects and to have an online community where we share our discoveries. We don't have a big budget for this stuff but this type of technical community service could look good on a resume or college application.

Our Technology Image
The use of the internet and intranets as communications and research tools in a knowledge-based economy has soared in just the past few years and we don't want to be laggards. In the digitally connected world, your website makes your first impression.

Involve Students in Authentic Work Experiences
By staying true to our mission we also need to engage student participation in developing, updating, and using institutional websites. With a sparse web publishing curriculum in our local schools, students are learning html and scripting languages on their own. This website, and school websites can provide opportunities for them to demonstrate what they've learned to the public.

In the short term we want to:

Online Homework Calendar
One (only one) teacher at Kennett is making use of the calendar software on the Kennett website. This creates a communication loop between Teachers, Students, and Parents. This will meet the request from parents for a way to monitor homework assignments. The amount of time it takes to update the site is more than made up for by the reduced number of routine parent phone calls. A number of other teachers in SAU 9 and SAU 13 have created and regularly update their own websites for homework and curriculum.
Homework Software: The Homework Site, free 30-day trial. Contains bulletin board, calendars, grades, homework, lunch menu.
Another program eBoard, is very easy to use and has some nice features. The product manager at eBoard is a former teacher who believes software should be intuitively functional without any training. If it requires training it's not designed well and busy teachers will not use it. eBoard is one of many educational software offerings listed on School Forge open source software.

Student Forum
A moderated student forum (blog) to address timely issues. This would have to meet a content code which is respectful of individuals and institutions in our community. Each post would have to be approved by a trusted adult before going online. This online forum has yet to be approved but there exists support for the voice of our students. eBoard has an iNote feature that could be used for this.

If you are a student and wish to be involved in supporting this website please email us.

Zend Php Tutorial (Excellent)