Gen Yes from Jeff Darrow on Vimeo.

This student made video is from the GenYES class at Winston Churchill MS, San Juan School District, California. Looks like fun!

Sylvia

Many of our GenYES and TechYES schools are laptop schools. The philosophy of putting the power into student hands with a laptop fits nicely with empowering students to improve education school-wide!

So naturally, my first post for the 1:1 Schools Blog is about student support of laptop programs. Not just tech support, but support for planning, implementation, and teachers. How can students do this? Do students do this? Yes they can and do in schools around the world!

In most schools, students are over 92% of the people in the system, and they are certainly the ones most affected by any change. Yet we often overlook them when we plan and implement visionary efforts like going 1:1. This does not have to be – students, if allowed to participate, can be powerful allies and evangelists for your laptop revolution.

Read the rest of Students – your best allies and evangelists for your 1:1 program at the 1:1 Schools Blog.

Sylvia

Student Support of Laptop Programs – new laptops? old laptops? Are you getting the benefit of making students allies in your laptop initiative? Peer mentoring, student-led training on new hardware and software, student tech support and other ideas can be time saving, cost effective, and best of all, good for students and the whole learning community.

This whitepaper contains research, case studies, practical information that you can use right now, whether you have one cart or are a 1:1 laptop school.

Student Support of Laptop Programs (PDF)

Sylvia

Last November, our Working with Tech-Savvy Kids article appeared in the ASCD magazine Educational Leadership. The good news is that Ed Leadership is one of the best magazines around for thoughtful articles about education. The bad news is that these articles are not freely available on the website.

But now, ASCD is offering ebooks with article collections with a short period of free access.

Better yet, I was very pleased to find out that Working with Tech Savvy Kids was selected for inclusion in a new ASCD ebook entitled Engaging the Whole Child, the first in a series of Whole Child ebooks. Educating the Whole Child ebook – free download link (valid April 15 – May 6, 2009)

As part of ASCD’s Whole Child Initiative, ASCD wanted to share with a larger audience—including preK–12 educators, policymakers, and parents—some of the fine articles on the topic of engagement that were originally published in Educational Leadership in 2006–2008. From April 15 through May 6, 2009, readers will be able to access these articles through a free ebook download. After May 6, sample chapters will be posted on the ASCD Web site and the complete book will be available through the online store for a small fee.

Educating the Whole Child ebook – free download link (valid April 15 – May 6, 2009)

Don’t miss the window to download the ebook for free! Please share this link with friends and colleagues.

Sylvia

Update: Thanks to all the commentors who helped debug the link errors. They seem to be working now. The basic problem was pilot error, compounded by the fact that this is a LARGE download (366 page PDF) and the ASCD site seems to be very busy. Enjoy!

Today’s students are increasingly savvy about the role technology plays in modern life. Yet schools are not keeping up. Students can be valuable resources in the areas of training and support. Five models have emerged that balance the benefits of service learning and leadership with the needs of schools struggling to integrate technology: students as committee members, students as trainers, students as technical support agents, students as resource developers and communicators, and students as peer mentors and leaders.

Unfortunately, most of the articles aren’t online, just the abstracts, although you can buy the articles.

As I’ve said before, Educational Leadership is one of the best publications dealing with K-12 education. Published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), every issue focuses on a single broad topic. The November 2008 issue is “Giving Students Ownership of Learning” and features some terrific articles about aspects of student-centered education from active learning, formative assessment, student voice, developing student expertise, the power of audience, and more

Sylvia