Relax, Refresh & Rejuvenate

Webster defines Rejuvenate:

1 a : to make young or youthful again : give new vigor to b : to restore to an original or new state <rejuvenate old cars>
2 a : to stimulate (a stream) to renewed erosive activity especially by uplift b : to develop youthful features of topography.

The 32 Elementary Principals & Assistants of my district spent this weekend doing just that at beautiful Sleeping Lady in Leavenworth, WA.

My part was to provide technical assistance and to give presentations on the semantic web and to show them how to get the most from their new Laptops & Treo 650 phone.

Building Principals are the key to any systemic shift; including those that include tech integration ...so this was critical work and I welcomed the opportunity to help.

On our first night I gave them an overview of the "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman and they saw many examples of how Web 2.0 is much different. I gave examples of the "steriods" and a few of the flatteners mentioned in the book.

As a result, we now have a BLS wiki(Krause & Hedman), Pope Blog(Williams), SingleWheel Blog(Crawford), Leifsen Land(Leifson), Mool Family(Mool), Woodland Blog(Keller).

In addition, all elementary principals got a very quick intro (awareness level) of SWIFT in their building through our Intel project.

Finally, they all have their voice mail set up and they can take and send messages and pictures using SMS & MMS on their Treo smartphones.

They had a brief introduction to Documents To Go and we even sent and received documents using Blue Tooth.

Each night I offered an open lab for all things Treo or Laptops from 9:00pm - Midnight on both Thursday & Friday night; many chose this option for extended opportunities in an informal setting.

It was a fantastic success!...but we still have much to do! Right now we are at the awareness level with most and soon we must move on the recommendations of ISTE for Administrators in NETS A.

The links that I used and shared for this conference can be found here in my delicious bookmarks: Maps Wikis Blogs Videos Treos