Things Have Changed

Our 1200 teachers each have their own laptop.
They each have a video projector and Dcam in their classroom.
Our principals each have a laptop with a replicator.
Principals and District Admin each have a Treo 650.
We are adding computers for 20,000 students this year and next.
Like most places the infrastructure is questionable and tech support needs improvement.
Professional development offerings are exceptional.

I am my District’s Director of Technology Planning.
We are the 9th largest district in Washington.
My job is to dream, determine and evangelize the desired future for integrated technologies in our 32 schools.

I went to Philadelphia and the NECC conference this summer.
I’ve read the World is Flat and watched the MIT online lecture by Thomas Friedman.
I switched to Firefox and Thunderbird.
I read WWWEDU.
I set up my del.icio.us account.
I set up my PortaPortal account.
I now receive 253 RSS feeds on Bloglines.
I tried a couple of other aggregators and didn’t like them.
I set up a few blogs on Blogger.
I set up a myspace account to watch my own children, shocking.
I set up a protopage account.
I set up my Technorati account where I found all of my blogs rank 979,918 with 0 links from 0 sites.
I set up a Zoto & Flickr account.
I set up a Gmail account.
I set up an All Consuming account.
I have a 43 things, 43 Places account.
I set up maps on Frappr, Wayfaring, & YourGMap.
I explored the world with Google, Virtual, & Flash Earth.
I further explored the world with Yahoo Local, a9, maplandia, USAphotoMaps, Worldwind and literally dozens of other maps.
I set up wikis on PB, Jot, Schtuff, Seed, Mozilla, Media, Spaces & Wikipedia.I bought an ipod and now listen to podcasts in my car and on my bike.
I use a Treo 650. I set up a SplashBlog & ODEO.
I set up a Digital Divide Network account.
I set up a ELGG account.
I set up a My Tube account.
I set up an Upcoming account.
I’ve found over 1000 geocaches with my 3 GPS receivers.
I read the bible on Bible Gateway.
I read the newspaper through RSS.
I’ve taken a class on Blackboard.
I set up seldom used accounts on Writely, Xanga, LiveJournal, Digg, Furl, SuperGlu, Plazes, Vizu, & Moodle.
I have a Yahoo & a Yahoo 360 Account.
I set up a Skype account (GEMalone) and talked to one person; although I see him at work every day.
I have chat accounts with AIM, GTalk, MSN & Yahoo and have integrated them with Trillian & Meebo.

After all of this; even though I sold TRS 80’s for a living, even though I was one of the very first owners of the Wozniak Edition IIGS, even though I could write programs in Basic, Logo, and Pascal (emphasis on could). Even though I’ve been an adjunct professor for major universities teaching classes on Laser Discs & LogoWriter. I have to admit, it didn't take long for me to determine that I am not the techno-nerd I used to be. Things have changed since I was last teaching in a 5th grade classroom in 1989. Demands are different. Heck, things have changed since I was last an elementary principal in 2003. Actually things have changed a great deal since my visit to Philadelphia in July!

Here are my questions…
How do you keep up? How do you keep current? How do you find and focus on the very best? How do you get principals and teachers to try this stuff without being overwhelmed? How do you determine the right stuff? Where did you start? Where should a newbie start? How do you get educators to realize it’s not about integrating tech anymore? How do you teach old dogs? Student engagement is impacted without question but where’s the connection to student achievement?