ASCD Conference

I had the pleasure of attending the ASCD conference in San Antonio Texas in early March 2010. The conference focused on education. I attended many sessions. Here is a recap of my day on Saturday.

The first session was on Curriculum Mapping - How can we use 21st century tool to navigate teaching and learning?

The presenter of this topic was Heidi Hayes Jacobs, who is a leader in the curriculum mapping field. She wanted to dispel the notion that curriculum units are like real estate - teacher feel they own them. This is a wrong notion. Curriculum is a shared, growing, evolving thing.

She noted the four phases for implementation of Curriculum Maps:

• Laying the foundation
• Launching the process
• Sustaining the map
  
• Advanced tasks

She also talked about five types of Alignment

• Internal - District align to one another
• Cumulative - Year to year K -12
• External - Aligns with state standards
• TO Students - Mets the needs of the learners in your district
  
• Global - Aims to help the school w/ global community

She also is a big proponent of Digital Portfolios. She feels that assessment is going to be done with digital portfolios.

I am anxious to read more of her materials and start to bring some of this to my district.

Each of our students has a network folder with their work. I hope to expand on Heidi's idea of digital portfolios and help the students move their high school work into their portfolios.


At 10 am on Saturday was the Keynote speaker, Jeffery Canada. I can't say enough about how much I enjoyed hearing him speak. I'm going to summerize his talk in another blog post because what he said was so important.


I focused on One to One computing on Saturday afternoon. The session was a bit of a letdown. I had hoped to get ideas on how to implement a one to one program. Instead it was just a justification lecture on why districts should move towards one to one. I felt the lecture was "preaching to the choir" with their reasons on why one laptop per child is so necessary.

Here are some of the reasons:

• Put the learner at the center of the learning process.
  
• Computers as imagination machines.
• 1:1 isn't about hardware, but software.

Three kinds of schools that have laptop one to one programs.

1. The pioneers

2. The Marketeers (want to get in the news)

3. Their neighbors (copying the other school but not having a plan)

A good resource for districts starting a one to one program is twitter. Follow tweets on one-to-one andsee what they are doing and not doing

The last session of the day was on Handhelds in education

Cell phones are not going away. We have to deal with them.

Saturday was a packed day.

I'll post about Sunday and Monday next.


Kim