Tuesday, March 24, 2009

We have the opportunity this year to purchase and upgrade some of our ICT equipment in the classroom thanks to our local Otago Community Trust.

After MUCH discussion we are looking at:

  • Bluetooth mouse and one of the small Apple keyboards for each teacher - linked to their TELA laptop

  • 1500+ lumen projector to be shared among every three classes - already have this sussed purchasing from TradeMe. I have not paid more than $500 for three very good projectors so far.

  • 40+ inch LCD TV on a trolly like this for each pair of classes....can be used as a monitor that everyone can see and is not effected ambient light like a projector!

  • digital camera for each room. Teachers will have two sets of rechargable batteries and their own twin charger. We also have 5 cameras that are available all the time for anyone who needs them.


Also other issues:

  • All teachers have admin rights to their TELA laptop and all teachers have one.

  • We have a pod of 9 mac laptops - ex TELA machines. We will purchase the current lot in 18 months too.

  • Wiimote IWB or two for the school

  • we have two tablets as well but they are not well used (as in used much) at the moment at all.

  • We are going to replace our server ASAP with a PC box to manage data, email etc with a mac-mini to provide mac profiles and mac user authentication. Have it sussed as to how to do this now in a robust way....yay.

  • Will run our own Wordpress install in the future to host our school website rather than Edublogs. Mostly so we can manage our own plugins etc.

  • We are using a wiki to host our staff meeting notes as well as curriculum documentation and professional learning resources. This is working particularly well - as a professional learning tool and opportunity for staff. We embed key documents in the appropriate pages using Scribd.


What do you see as 'key kit' for teachers? Anything missing from my list?

Please go wild in the comments .... :-)


cheers
Greg

2 comments:

  1. Hi Greg,
    I was wondering if you see the pod of laptops that the classes have access to eventually being in classrooms. So one day each class would have many more computers? Just as a teacher I really prefer to have laptops as a permanent classroom tool. I guess it is like all other equipment, I am more likely to use and become reliant upon a tool that is a part of my classroom. I used to teach in a school where we had to share scissors and paints and very few teachers bothered to do Art. One thing I liked about having computers in "my" room was that the children learnt all of the little ways of the particular computer. I also hate it when other classes have not left the computers as they found them, with stuff saved in random places etc. A pod is a great way to share a small number of tools but eventually it would be good to know you will have your own. Is that the idea of "the pod" in other schools?

    Disa

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  2. Hi, I am interested in the idea of using wikis for staff meetings. Does 'embedding' something mean it can't be changed I am using a series of linked wikis for our website, and the kids have access and can change things, which is monitored, but I would like to have some things that can't be changed ....

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