EETT Success Stories And videos

You can tell from her blog entry that Karen Gentry, EETT TIS at Sophia-Soak Creek in Raleigh County, has taken to her TIS coordinator's challenge to go global!

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Time flies when you are busy and having fun! Last month I spent a lot of time trying to set up partnerships with other countries. I found epals for grades 3-4-5. 3rd grade received their letters Friday from Ireland and where thrilled! Australia is writing questions about our government that my 5th graders will answer. 5th grade is also matched with Denmark and Russia. 4th grade is matched with Poland and South Korea. The introduction letters take time, however after that the replies take very little time to answer. ..My school is also doing a progressive story with schools from all over, I'll post a link after the stories are finished and posted on VoiceThread.

Karen has recently created a digital project and those of you who are interested can read about it here-- http://globalshare.wikispaces.com/ 

Spring Valley HS Tech Wolves program from WSAZ news

Agents for change: Students Facilitating the Drive for 21st Century Learning created by the Tech Wolves

From Will Totten at Spring Valley HS in Wayne County--

"So last Thursday could have turned out to be an extremely stressful situation and a potential disaster. But it all worked out so well I think it turned into one of my most uplifting and rewarding days on the job thus far.

"Wayne County held a county-wide SMARTboard training session last Thursday at various sites around the county. Spring Valley was selected to hold 3 of these sessions. The sysop, another county tech person, and I were selected to facilitate (I much prefer this term to trainer or some other such title) these sessions. Anyway, to make a long story short, 3 days before the training happened, we found out that the other county guy could not be here and the Sysop and I were requested to go to another school where they desperately needed facilitators. So that left us needing 3 trainers here at the school.

"With the EETT grant, we selected 15 teachers to head up "technology teams" of around 3 to 5 teachers. We asked three of the leaders if they would like to be facilitators for the training and they agreed. I also put another on stand-by in case we needed him. I constructed an outline and we did little mini-training sessions whenever we could find time (after school, planning, before school) to get them comfortable enough to lead the session.

"The day of the training, the county technology coordinator needed another trainer for another site, so we activated our stand-by guy to go there. On the day of the SMARTboard training, I also led an hour long training on Livegrades and Acuity Unwired before heading out to Fort Gay. The training was for two hours and it went awesome. The principal really liked us and wanted us to come back to do some more staff development. The trainings that were lead by the tech leaders also went very well and I received awesome feedback from those that attended.

"I was very heartened by this. I know one of the main goals of the grant is to create a sustainable model that the school will use long after the EETT funding is done. I think this concept of having the tech teams with leaders facilitating professional development (something I wanted to start next year) is already taking form and has some real potential".

Spring Valley High School