MYAN Peer Leadership Award 2010 - Tim

Mt. Ararat High School holds award ceremonies to recognize the contributions and achievements of students. MTA High School recognized juniors during Advisory this morning. Organizers asked me to present Tim's MYAN Peer Leadership Award to him.

Find my remarks below:

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MYAN is the Maine Youth Action Network, a state-wide organization dedicated to encouraging youth leadership development. They do this through a Peer-Leadership Conference and Workshops. At MTA, we know them best as one of the organizations that supported the development of Wellness Wednesdays.

The MYAN Youth Leadership Awards recognize young people who exemplify leadership in their groups, schools & communities. These youth are selected for their dedication and passion for making positive change.

Tim seeks out opportunities to help with technology in schools. He takes responsibility for his own learning in and out of school. He transfers knowledge and skills from work in the community to activities in school.

Beyond that, Tim is helping us to understand the mission and vision of our school:

MTA Vision and Mission Statement
At Mt. Ararat High School our vision is for every student to explore and work toward fulfilling his or her unique potential.

Tim is taking responsibility for shaping his high school experience to meet his and our needs:

• He led the identification of the Network Challenge.
• He contributes to technology use at the high school as an ITeam tech support person.
• He works with District Technology Department to contribute a student perspective to network use at the high school.
• He will participate in the competitive NextGen Operators program for the 2010 MLTI Student Conference. Tomorrow he will work along side Networkmaine, Apple and Cisco engineers to support the wireless network for 1000 MLTI laptops that students use in Orono.
• His volunteer work at the middle and high school has convinced the District Technology Department to hire him during the summer to work on tech support.
• Finally, he has also worked with Guidance, Staff and Mentors to create internship for next school year that will extend his work from the summer.

His leadership helps us understand how students can take a greater role in identifying learning opportunities important to them and make them happen.

Thank you, Tim, for your leadership!

High School Students Reach Across Globe Through Technology

• High School Students Reach Across Globe Through Technology - Annotated

  DJ submitted this request to alert people about our collaboration with Maris Stella High School. He received some authentic feedback from the Editor of this About.com section. This use of network tools illustrates students' developing understanding of networking to achieve goals.

  tags: ChBL, ITeam, mlti, assessment, tech

  • High School Students Reach Across Globe Through Technology

    From Douglas Smith,

    • - post by sspaeth
  • Our mission has been to communicate and collaborate with students from Singapore about real world issues of information, communication and technology skills faced in schools today.

  • How I Got Involved With My Cause:

    I've always had a passion for technology and when a few friends and I got involved in the school's 1-1 laptop program, we were able to come up with solutions to problems that the school faced.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Note that the annotations that I added to highlights from DJ's entry are not included in this blog posting. You can see my comments in the annotated version linked above.

Middle school students support Scratch 2.0

Seventh-grade members of our ITeam have been creating Scratch Projects for several months. The projects started simply and have progressively increased in complexity. I also see them apply concepts that they are learning in math (e. g. x- y-coordinate systems) to a context for which they have great affinity, game development. They are spending considerable amounts of time exploring and creating projects outside of school.



Look at this gallery of projects to see more examples: http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/75680

We discussed the plans to develop Scratch 2.0 and one student proposed development of capacity similar to Build Your Own Blocks (BYOB) that several advanced users of Scratch have been developing and evaluating: http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/79892 When I showed him BYOB, he downloaded the image and created test blocks with interesting properties. He created an arrow control with a rate parameter and discovered that a negative value for the parameter inverted the senses of up/down and left/right arrows as well as controlling the rate.

When I showed the Scratch programmers the Scratch entry in the DML Competition site and explained the rationale for comments from users, they considered adding a comment. But, ultimately they chose to create new Scratch projects instead. They are preparing to work with middle school technology teachers at the District Summer Technology Institute to incorporate Scratch into their classes. We all look forward to using Scratch 2.0.

Google Building Maker- evaluation

I read the Google Blog and learned about Building Maker, a browser-based 3D modeling program. I wanted to learn more and give some feedback so I explored and then took their survey. Here is my more extended response:

I am a technology integration specialist in a Maine School District (MSAD 75, Topsham, Maine) where we have one-to-one laptop implementation (Maine Learning Technology Initiative, MLTI) from grades 7 through 12. We are trying to identify ways for students to apply math concepts in service to their communities. We explored SketchUp modeling and found it to be more complex than we could manage with available resources. I decided to explore Building Maker as a potentially shallower learning curve.

I saw that one of your featured users, do nuko, was mapping extensively in Sapporo, Japan. I lived there many years ago but still recall the time fondly so I decided to explore the Building tools there. I suspect it will be some time before you provide Building Maker images for Topsham, Maine.

Drawing on Scratch

I told ITeam members about the enthusiasm that Ms. Loughlin, the Assistant Superintendent of MSAD 75, showed for the generative work that they have been creating with Scratch, SAM, Alice and video. They expressed appreciation for the recognition and seem to be inspired to create more.

Coby created a drawing program that uses the arrow keys to control the "Pen" and a palette to control the colors. If you need instructions to understand how to use it, click on the "Learn more about this project" link.

Learn more about this project.

I tried to adjust the scale of the applet to get the controls to fit within the column width of the Blogger page but it does not scale project as it does images. The layout of the programs that Coby and Scratch designers have used causes some controls to be out-of-sight. I am excited to see that the Scratch programmers are using x-, y-coordinate systems to create and discuss their development strategies. This kind of application of math concepts should serve them well in more formal math and science learning.