Thursday, December 26, 2013

iWizards Rock the House at Tech Orientation

As the year ends, I am republishing the Opinion Drive-thru's seven most viewed posts of 2013.  This is #6.

When our ninth graders came to school, iPads in hand, August, 2012, forming a tech “club” was the farthest thing from anyone’s mind.  They were our first 1:1 iPad class, and all of the professional development focus was on the teachers.  In fact, we were unprepared to give the kids anything but the most minimal orientation to the iPads.

However, creating the opportunity for fourteen year olds who loved the iPad to
form, self-direct, and prosper was an initiative that impacted the entire Mercy High School community for the good.

On the first day of their formation, the iWizards began to compose this mission statement:

The Mercy iWizards assist, serve, and encourage the MHS community to integrate iPad technology into their lives. Our purpose is to learn about mobile technology and to help promote, technology use to the fullest advantage. As a student-run technology group, we vow to provide a helping hand to every student and teacher. We have a special interest in introducing new students to the iPad. The iWizards are here to help. 

On August 16, they lived up to this Mission in a profoundly impactful way.  They delivered a Mercy iPad tech orientation to all of our students.  The iWizards designed and taught this orientation.  The process took several weeks of before school meetings and a major dress rehearsal on the last day of school in June.  To their tremendous credit all  iWizards attended the lengthy rehearsal.  And each one maintained her dedication and came ready to engage our new students, last Friday.

The girls hand-selected nine wonderful staff members as mentors for their sessions who gave up the several hours for rehearsal in June and "show time" in August.  Of course our superb IT personnel, Tom James and Gary Bank supported this endeavor every step of the way.  Here are scenes from the event:




------------
A shout out to our several staff members who assisted with registration and the wonderful photographs in the movie slideshow.  Huge thanks to Lucy Gray's workshop contributions as well.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'd love to see the tutorials. Hope you'll make them public at some point. Congratulations, everyone, and here's to a great start to the year...

Anonymous said...

We are about to activate our iTunes U public site. I would like the tutorials to move from Moodle to there. Your comment will be a subject for our next meeting!

Blog Archive