Technology Night Wrap-Up

The first Technology Night at my school was a success!  Teachers and students got to showcase their projects with parents and members of the community and everyone seemed to have a great time.  We had about 20 families present, which was more than we had anticipated, so I'm very happy with the turnout.


There was a large cloud of people visiting Ms. Poole's class project on persuasion movies, and the Qwizdom and Smartboard demos seemed to be very popular with parents, as well.  I had some parents ask about our equipment and why we use macbooks.  I'm always eager to answer this question! I get a lot of people asking me about PC's being easier and why we spend money on the macbooks.  Having both PC's and mac's available was one of the reasons I took a job in this school system.  I think it's INCREDIBLY important for our students to learn both systems, because you never know what you're going to run into down the road.  As a student, I ran into both and had to know how to use them and now I'm very lucky to be so versatile-having that really helps in the job market too.

The only thing I would have changed was more student participation. Some teachers told me they had a hard time getting their students to come.  The booths that had more students there to discuss their projects had more people around them and more interest than the others.  I think having some kind of student initiative would be helpful, such as extra credit, or free ice cream in the cafeteria for participating. 

The night was small, but hopefully, will be the first step in addressing more awareness about technology in our schools.  Way, way, down the road, I would love to add a video component to this night and have a school video contest and make it a red carpet event!