It's been a fun week at CA. A high point for me was serving as a substitute Assistant Coach for the Sixth Grade Boys Soccer Team. We have such great, creative, and nice kids here at the school.

Another great moment was getting the following video from CA Fifth Grade Teacher Ruth Larson. On the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech on the National Mall, Mrs. Larson's class took time to read an interview with a man who was present, watch the historic video of MLK speaking, and read the text of the speech. The class used QR codes to access the interview and to link to a PDF of the speech, which was then imported into the app Notability for making notations.

From the video, the class talked about what MLK did as a speaker to grip his audience. From the text of the speech, the class discussed the craft of the writing, and the students learned several new words such as score, manacles, bound, redemptive, exalted, sweltering. Each student was assigned to create his or her own “I Have A Dream” speech. Each student then drafted his/her speech about dreams for how the classroom and how their fifth grade should be this year. Once the words were down, they selected a screencasting/presentation app to record these. They were all great, but I thought I would share this one by Molly.

CA has always been a forward-thinking school when it comes to technology, but having students all on the same platform presents a tremendous advancement. The iPad is a powerful media creator: it allows students to create anything, anywhere, anytime. It is a tool that can be used in multifaceted ways to enable students to demonstrate knowledge and mastery of subject matter. The iPad is aligned with the movement of technology in society –it’s all about the cloud. Learning is going beyond the four walls of a classroom, and the iPad extends the possibility of this learning. We are not thinking about it as a repository of content-specific apps; it's far more -- actually they don’t exist or those that do aren’t really that good. You can’t re-create a master teacher's course with an app! Some schools have too narrow a view of the apps as the "end all." Successful implementation of this program will be related to how we creatively use the device as teachers.

Education as an industry is at a crossroads. It is a time for us to re-think our teaching and align this technology with creative ways of teaching and learning, as well as what has worked for us in the past. This example of student learning demonstrates the amazing possibilities.