One of the highlights of Mrs. Conklin’s third-grade class is the creation of Flat Stanley. Traditionally this class has mailed Stanley to family and friends across the world. For those of you not familiar with the 1964 book written by Jeff Brown, Flat Stanley was flattened by a bulletin board and found himself being mailed to places all around the world.

Last year’s third-grade class mailed Stanley to friends and family in South Korea.

Flat Stanley visits with the U.S. Army in South Korea

The current third-graders will continue this tradition again with a focus on mailings to Mexico and Japan. However, this year, with the assistance of TJ’s Technology Department, Flat Stanley has gone digital. During the course of the school year, thanks to the school’s video conferencing capability, the class will visit with other students in six different schools across the United States. Each of the participating classes will receive Flat Stanley from other schools and will be responsible for treating him like their guest and recording his visit.

It’s the responsibility of Mrs. Conklin’s class to create their version of Flat Stanley and write a two paragraph description to introduce him. The first paragraph will be about their class, and the second paragraph will be about TJ Stanley, his home town (Joplin), his school (TJ), and his own personal details. As part of this project, Stanley will be digitally photographed at different sites in and around Joplin, and also in some of the student’s homes.

We should soon be receiving our first guest Stanley. He will be visiting us from Kempsville Elementary School in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Stanley will begin his digital voyage on November 20. Mrs. Conklin’s class is looking forward to getting to know students from Virginia.

We will continue to track our Stanley digital visits for you.

I received the following e-mail from my boss this morning and thought this would be a good time to let you all know that we're back and looking forward to another exciting year in the Technology Department at TJ.

"I have known since we started that we are real pioneers in using Tablet PCs and wireless projectors in the classroom, and I've been trying to get Microsoft and some other vendors to notice what we're doing here at TJ for a few months now. Today, Alfred Thompson posted an article about our Tablet PC program on the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) community blog (with a link to our Web site that a lot of folks are clicking). Alfred is the K-12 Computer Science Academic Relations Manager for Microsoft. I talked with him on the phone a couple of times, and he said that our program is one of the few he's seen that does more than simply put computers in the lab and add some computer classes to the curriculum. If we keep this idea top-of-mind with our students and faculty, and continue to improve on our support and training processes, we will grow this program into one that will be a model for a lot of other schools."

http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2007/09/10/a-laptop-school-that-seems-to-work.aspx

Today is the last day of school, and this will be my last blog. I thought I would tell you why I am so taken with the technology of today. Perhaps to truly appreciate the capabilities, it might be appropriate to tell you what it was like in the “good old days.” No, I didn’t have to walk five miles to school over snow covered roads, or even ride on a Missouri mule. We did have to go to the library, both at school and the public library to do our research. Sorry, no Internet, no Wikipedia, no cut and paste. After pulling dusty old encyclopedias off the shelves, notes were copied in long-hand (with our sources properly footnoted, and laboriously tracked manually).

Neatness counted on the papers we turned in, just as it does today. But, alas, no nifty tablet computers. We used manual typewriters. I’m sure you probably heard your grandma and grandpa talk about them. Neat little machines, but they required a lot of finger power. These eventually gave way to electric typewriters which were much easier to use, but still an error on the page meant having to retype (keyboard) the entire page. Then, there was that awful, dirty carbon paper. Yeah, that’s how we made copies. We didn’t have today’s wonderful collating copy machines. To make a lot of copies of a document, the school secretary usually prepared a stencil for use on the mimeograph machine. Some of you will remember the awful purple ink that went everywhere but where you wanted it to go.



One should not forget that wonderful precursor of the computer, the Friden Flexowriter. This machine was a big electric typewriter and boy, was it LOUD! An electronic keyboard punched holes in a paper tape. To reproduce copies, you fed the tape back into the machine and it reproduced the key strokes. The noise it made was unbelievable. To correct an error, you simply cut the error out of the tape and glued the tape back together again, or aligned the punched holes and spliced in a corrected piece of tape.

Things finally progressed to the “mag card” typewriters. Mag is a shortened form of magnetic. Type was stored on a magnetic belt and you could actually retrieve data and make corrections on portions of the document. And oh, copy machines started to become available. However, they were not much like the copy machines of today. No hole punch, stapler, or collating. Collating multiple page documents required many, many trips around the conference table, picking up pages on each pass.

Then came the “dawning of the age of Aquarius,” and the advent of “word processors.” These also, were big clumsy machines with a printer attached. But, they were far superior to their predecessors. Over the years, computers have evolved from great, hulking machines that required rooms of their own to what we know today. In the world of technology, the “good old days,” weren’t really so good. No wonder I am so taken with what we have available today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Whatever it is, I think students at Thomas Jefferson Independent Day School are bound to be the first in Joplin to have it available.

Have a wonderful summer.

It’s a great time to be a student!

With all of the new projectors, computers, DVD’s, and video conferencing equipment, it was obvious to the Technology Department from the beginning of the school year that we would have to develop a way to keep track of everything.

After a lot of research, we settled on a hand-held mobile asset tracking system from Wasp Technologies. The PDA (personal digital assistant) is much like its close relatives, the Palm Pilots. It is, basically, a hand-held computer with an optical scanner. This allowed us to set up a database that includes the type of equipment, manufacturer, condition of equipment, maintenance, and serial numbers, among other things. Much like the optical scanners that are used in retail stores and grocery chains, the unit scans barcodes, and translates them into alpha/numerical sequence. This allows a large amount of equipment to be included in our database in a short amount of time. The portability is an important factor too, since it allows us to scan large pieces of equipment that are delivered directly to the classroom. The PDA then connects with a computer and synchronizes new assets with the existing database. Also, changes to the main database are transmitted back to the PDA, so a full and accurate list of assets is always available on both units.

This unit also came with a barcode printer which enabled us to develop and print our own asset tags. As a result, we now have a firm handle on all of our electronic equipment, where each piece is located, when it is scheduled for maintenance, and who it is assigned to. This all proves to be very helpful in a lot of different situations.

It's a great time to be a student!

Here in the Technology Department at TJ, we have been up to our lapels in laptops--computers, that is. Regular readers of the Globe will know that we are in the midst of distributing the convertible notebook/tablet computers to all of our Upper School students. Thanks to a generous donation, we are able to do this without any additional cost to our parents. Starting in ninth grade, our students are assigned a computer for their use throughout the four years of High School. After completion of high school, students have the option to purchase the computer they have been using at a reduced price. Since many colleges are now requiring laptops in the lecture hall, we believe we are giving our students a “leg-up” on the technology they will need.

In addition to the computers, our wireless networked projectors were delivered this week. Remember blackboards and chalk? Forgetaboutit! They don’t exist anymore. Faculty connects wirelessly to a projector, and the image on their computer screen and it is projected to a whiteboard at the front of the classroom. In the same way that students are able to organize their notes and assignments, teachers are able to keep their lesson plans orderly and at their fingertips.



Lower School (grades K-5) students will practice their handwriting on computer screens, and will be working on worksheets that previously would have consumed a lot of paper. Their best efforts will be sent home electronically so Mom can still have a copy for the refrigerator.

This also opens the world of webcasts to our classrooms. We have found some really exciting sites, from NASA, to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, to the White House, the Library of Congress, and the United Nations. Some of these webcasts are live productions while others have been pre-recorded and can be shown on demand. Faculty can pick content that works with the class study, or sometimes, content can be picked just for fun.


It’s a great time to be a student!