I am sitting in my graduate level UMASS-Boston Adolescence class now and on my laptop, trying desperately to maintain the “very low” connection I picked up from some location called “cupcake.” At the beginning of class, the professor was unable to get the light of the overhead projector on. He remarked to me, “This must be what you experience in the Boston Public Schools.”

In most BPS schools, yes, it would be. But at TechBoston Academy, the model for future public schools, I am lucky enough to have access to more modern tools to teach with. At TBA, we work in a wireless, networked environment where everyone, including students, has their own laptop. I use an LCD projector which connects my laptop to a SMART board. When I lecture, I make animated, colorful, creative power point presentations, and I use the SMART board to annotate my slides on the projection. I can save my notes and drawings onto a networked drive which students can access. I maintain a web site where I post the assignments, daily agenda, handouts, and resources. I incorporate offline and online activities into my lectures.

After unplugging and plugging the projector back in, the professor realized he had not turned the projector light switch on. Hooray! He could continue his 3 hour black and white text on transparency lecture in the yellow light of the classroom!And yet I complain that our school does not do enough with and through technology?

If TBA is indeed the model for future schools, then the model needs to be replicated sooner rather than later. And surprisingly, it looks like it needs to be implemented in some college and university classrooms! We don’t have it ALL figured out, but I am proud and confident enough to say that we are definitely leading the way.

What IS certain is that my students are lucky to be at TBA! They would be MISERABLE in a class like this!

(so I couldn’t post this to my blog at the time that I wrote it because the connection was so low, so does this count as “blogging” or am I just “posting” it? [Insert the obvious “gratuitous nerd alert” comment here]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 6:22 pm and is filed under PD, reflections. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.