Our July 23th Meeting

Our meeting scheduled for July 23th at 5:30 will be held at the Osborne Elementary School in the Quaker Valley S. D. Our guest speaker for the evening will be Dr. Joseph Morrone, Senior Director of Administrative Services. Joe came to Q.V. from his technology work in the Phoenixville S. D. in 1991 and has been primarily instrumental in raising Q. V's technology program to a world class level.

In 1991 he, on behalf of the district, entered and won the state wide competition to become a "Digital School" in Pa. The Quaker Valley School District was one of three districts selected by the Pennsylvania Department of Education to receive a two-year “Digital School District” grant beginning in 2001. Key technology provisions in Quaker Valley’s proposal were to supply laptop computers to every student in grades 3–12, to set up wireless networks in all district buildings and several community sites, and to provide wireless Internet connections in the homes of all students in grades 3–12. Joe consults nationwide, instructs at UCLA in the summer and is a founding member of the National Education Computing Conference (NECC). Joe has seen it all.

In 1993 the Rand Corporation conducted and published an 83 page study of the program. They gave praise in many areas and found fault in some. I am sure Joe will make reference to the report in his comments.

I have asked Joe to speak about the following:

• The efficacy of 1-1 computing
• Types of equipment; whiteboards, laptops. etc.
• Infrastructure in school & at home
• Architectural considerations in the planning
• Security
• Bumps in the road - The Rand Study
• Partnerships!!!
• Staff development
• Funding
• Return on investment
• Curriculum integration
• Technical support

Please make every effort to be present for this very important meeting.

Fortes in Fide

Web Technology & Our 50th Reunion

And now for something completely different. Three years ago I, and some of my classmates from North began organizing a 50th reunion celebration. None of us in 1956 in our wildest dreams had any conception of "the Web". The organizing committee never met face to face. All of our deliberations and plans were made using telephone conferencing. I found a site in Canada that provided on-line templates for reunion planning. The site was interactive in some respects. We developed the site and notified our classmates by email. We also used the web extensively to locate "lost" classmates. Using video tapes and stills from the four day event, we produced a DVD using iDVD, iTunes and iMovie. We also produced a CD of the top twenty five hits for 1956 and burned copies for everyone. We contracted the site for five years.

None of us had every heard of social networking or web 2.0, but here we were using early versions of what now are ubiquitous examples of the web as a work platform. Take a look at the site; you may have a reunion coming up.