The Grade 4 students of St. Stephen's are diving into the world of Wendell the World's Worst Wizard! As they read the engaging and humorous book, they are taking inspirations from Wendell and building their very own robots in our school's FabLab which is our STEM/maker space. They also send tweets to Wendell and ask questions every once in a while to get some ideas.

That's pretty cool in itself. Where it gets extra special is what happens next month. John Spencer, half of the husband and wife writing team of John and Christy Spencer (hence the initials J.C.), will arrive the day before Miami Device begins to read the last chapter to the students, followed by a Q & A session, and book signings. Then, the students will take Mr. Spencer on a tour of the FabLab where their robots will be on display.

I'll be sure we post plenty of photos via St. Stephen's social media.

If you would like to learn more about John Spencer & his ideas, follow him on Twitter at @spencerideas, or, meet him and attend one of his three sessions at Miami Device.

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You can watch a video preview of Wendell the World's Worst Wizard below. I hope you enjoy it as much as our students have.

There are countless reasons why I look forward to going to St. Stephen's Episcopal Day School every morning. Some include:

• Stepping onto a beautiful campus, maintained by our skilled maintenance crew
• Being surrounded by a sea of smiles
• Having dads & moms say, "Good morning, Mr. Jacomino!" (Usually pronounced in Spanish, Hac-o-meen-o)
• Witnessing our students run up to our beloved, new Chaplain for a high-five or a quick hug
• Hearing morning announcements and flag salute where children's voices are heard and parents are there to share
• Walking past the classrooms and catching glimpses of some of the finest and most engaging teaching by the amazing educators we have on staff
• Knowing that I have the most supportive and caring administration anyone could ask for

Those are just a few reasons.

Then, there are these three fine educators who I get to interact with more often than anyone else.

Nerissa, Jenny, and Inge make up the Innovation Team here on campus. They work closely with our 30 teachers and 300 students. Twice a week, we meet in my office to discuss all that's going on around our school. We make sure we've followed up on items from the last meeting, evaluate what's currently going on, and then plan, predict, and project into the future! There's never a dull moment, there's always a 'squirrel!' moment, and excitement is a constant. The enthusiasm that comes from these angelic EdTech facilitators is what I feel makes me the luckiest director of technology on the planet!

 

Just a little bit about each one:

Nerissa is new as an employee but not new to St. Stephen's. She is an alumna of our school and she loves being back, teaching alongside many teachers from her years here. She's passionate about education, equality, inclusivity, and works hard at making positive change every chance she gets. She works mostly with the preschool teachers and students but definitely makes an impact on all aspects of our life on campus. She is also a Miami Device Featured Speaker!

Jenny has been at St. Stephen's since 2004 and I'm convinced her middle name is Positivity! She always has a smile and a can-do attitude. We share our early-adopter excitement and love for new technologies. But just as with the rest of the team, Jenny understands the importance of sound pedagogy and making technology support the teaching only when it's appropriate. Maybe SAMR is her maiden name?

Inge was a classroom teacher when I first started at St. Stephen's 8 years ago (she had been here 4 years prior to that). She was engaging and passionate about teaching and she knew exactly when to leverage technology just at the right time and for the right purpose. I had to have her on my team so her superpowers could be shared school-wide and not just with one set of students. My supportive Head of School granted me that request and it's been an awesome ride! Last year, she was selected as a Teacher of the Future by the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS).

Most schools or districts have an IT admin and an EdTech director, my background in network engineering and music education puts me in the awesome position of merging the two roles into one. That allows me to work closely with my team on our EdTech vision and then rest assured they will carry it out like the rock stars that they are. I then get to keep up with the school's hardware/software needs, maintain a robust and safe network, keep our website up to date, work on Miami Device which has become a job in itself, support all administrative objectives, and carry out the many goals of our technology plan on a timely basis and, hopefully, within budget. It's a tough job, but someone's gotta love it!

I am beyond fortunate. While I hope I express it daily, I wanted to put it in writing and hence, this post. Nerissa, Jenny, & Inge, you ladies are the best and I look forward to a long, continued partnership with you!

Apple and Pearson's products did what they were designed to do. The Los Angeles Unified School District lacked vision, a plan, and an understanding of what 21st century education is. Most people misunderstand the term "21st Century Education" and assume it is synonymous with the use of technology. It isn't. It is excusable for a non-educator to think that. For a school district to miss that, it is not. Having the correct focus and goals would have prevented this disaster which is sending the wrong message to schools on the fence about moving forward in to the true 21st century. And I have some ideas and folks who can fix it for you.

Apple sold iPads to the Los Angeles school district. The devices worked as they were designed to. Nowhere in the iPads' user guides does it ever say that the iPad will increase learning or fix problems in education.

"The moves by the Los Angeles school district, one of the largest school districts in the U.S., was supposedly designed to inject technology into the classroom."

The district wanted to "inject technology into the classroom." I'm pretty confident that $1.3 BILLION injected plenty of technology into the classroom. I hope most people who read this can already see the problem. What the goal is missing is, well, the goal! I have not found one instance in the several stories (NBC News, c|net) about this nonsense where the school district, its Board, or superintendents mention change in teaching and learning. At the end of one article, a Pearson representative is quoted as saying, "Our focus is, and has always been, on helping all students learn.” Learn what? Learn how?

In a Facebook comment, I stated that I could write a book on this topic but, like this post, will (try to) keep it short and simple in the hopes that it will be read by many.

Apple did not fail here. iPads are amazing computers that function very well. Pearson has a product up for purchase and when you buy it, they give it to you. The failure of this initiative was 100% on the decision-makers and any educator in a leadership role of the implementation process of the LA Unified School District.

Who am I? I am an educator. I am also a director of technology at a school where the students each have an iPad, starting in 1st grade and up through 5th (our elementary school's top grade level). Our teachers, parents, administration, and students could not be happier with the education they receive at our little school. Did you catch that? I never said a thing about the iPads, or SmartBoards, or iMacs, or MacBooks, or Wifi, or air conditioners, or the classroom lights when I made the statement about the experience here at St. Stephen's. I'll make a statement that will sound old and tired to those of us who have spent years in educational technology (EdTech) but will hopefully make a spark in a non-educator's brain, "technology is just a tool!" One of my book's chapters would be dedicated to how using the word "just" in that statement is a bit off because it lessens how important these tools are by stating that's 'merely' what they are. I digress. Here's my point...

You MUST start with teachers who are trained. Not trained in how to use an iPad (copy/paste, switch between apps, export from camera roll, configure their email, and use a word processor), but rather trained and educated on how students best learn today and how to prepare them for their future, and not our past. How is that different than before? It is different because now, facts are free. It is useless to the future persons that we are educating today to stuff them with tons of facts that only prepare them for a just-in-case scenario in their future. The Internet holds static answers (but beware, there's plenty of efforts working on making the web as dynamic as we are) and those answers are easily found. If a teacher is doing no more than delivering factual information from the front of a classroom and asking the students to memorize that information so that they can later show they memorized it by answering questions on a test, then that teacher needs to fear for his or her future as an educator.

"Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, should be." -David Thornburg

What does a 21st century educator do differently? They accept and embrace the nature of facts being a quick Google away. They know you can pull out an Android, Bing just about anything found in a textbook, and there it will be. Facts are free and good educators know this. What happens next is where the not-so-magical but important wonder lies. Teachers now get to explore with students. They can find real-world problems and encourage students to work together to solve them. Teachers are free to send learners to a website to learn some facts but then use those facts to create something that's never been done before. Educators who understand 'when' we are in time, give students a choice on how they will demonstrate what they have learned or how they will showcase what they have created. Sharing solutions to problems is what today's students should be focusing on and it is what employers will be looking for when they end their scholastic years.

To LAUSD, do you want to fix this without further embarrassing yourselves and using the media to shine a light on everyone else but you? Hire a real expert! Get someone like Adam Bellow to oversee the direction of your teachers' professional development. Get Tony Vincent to provide that PD. Learn from teachers like Erin Klein about technology NOT being the focus or center of any lesson planning but rather a very useful tool to be used at the right time, for the right purpose. Hire Todd Nesloney (aka @TechNinjaTodd) to show your lower grade teachers the amazing ways students become engaged when they feel empowered by the teacher and can then express themselves on a blog post or iMovie. Have Kevin Honeycutt come out and inspire teachers beyond what you thought was possible and watch them have a newfound fire at the heart of why they became educators in the first place. Get Dr. Wesley Fryer to work with your upper-school faculty so they can explore the countless ways students are able to show what they know and share what they make with digital media. Are you concerned with assessment? Great, hire Dean Shareski and/or John Spencer to help out with that. Carl Hooker has proven for years what a successful independent school district can do with a 1:1 iPad implementation and would be glad to help out, I'm sure. You may want to also hire his teammate, Lisa Johnson, to come out and show your teachers the endless lessons available to them that would make their iPad use come alive and would result in students truly enjoying what would otherwise be flat, stale, and boring. Need more? Hope you get lucky and Vicki Davis is available. Get George Couros (aka The Principal of Change) to speak to your leadership and open their eyes very, very wide. Have Sarah Thomas demonstrate what passionate, thoughtful teaching looks like. When you decide to use Google Apps for Education, get Kyle Pace to come out and train your entire staff, including administration and superintendents. Need more suggestions? Tweet me, I've got an amazing PLN!

Alternatively, you can do as one commenter posted somewhere on Facebook, "bring books back!" You can stop trying to do the technology thing for its own sake, save $1.3 BILLION, and continue to teach students in ways that will prepare them for nothing more than the past. On the bright side, books don't run out of batteries.

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At the time of writing this, I did not notice commenting on my blog was disabled and I'm currently working on getting it functional again. Feel free to comment on my facebook post for now. Thanks!

Last year, at Miami Device, my friend Humberto Perez showed up with quite the photography setup. Not a surprise as he is an audio visual production teacher in Austin, TX.

What I found most impressive about the whole setup was how inexpensive it all was considering the quality of the end product. About $175 total based on current prices! Of course, this is BYOi (Bring Your Own iPad).

Many people stop to ask me about it so I created the interactive photo below that links to each component when you click on it or its label (there is a list below the image if the links do not work for you). Many of the items have cheaper as well as more expensive alternatives so I'm sharing what I purchased and can tell you I'm very satisfied with each one.

iOgrapher Mobile Media Case for iPad

• iPad Air
• iPad Mini
• iPad 2, 3, 4
• iPhone 5/5S (I have not tested this one)

NEEWER® 160 LED CN-160 Dimmable Ultra High Power LED Light

AmoVee SG-108 Shotgun DV Stereo Microphone (must also purchase next item below for proper function)

Rode SC4 Microphone Cable

37MM Wide Angle Macro Conversion Lens

Davis & Sanford EXPLORERV 60" Tripod

Director of Technology

Felix is currently the Director of Technology at St. Stephen's Episcopal Day School in Coconut Grove, Florida and is the co-organizer of ShifinEdu (formerly Miami Device). He is part of a team including a Director of Innovative Teaching & Learning, two amazing STEAM Specialists. He also  works with the best Head of School and administration team anyone could hope for.

St. Stephen's has gained much attention in the Educational Technology world due to hard work by the technology team, enthusiastic teachers, supportive administration, and excellent professional development. This success is measured by the most important component of any school initiative - the students! Learners at St. Stephen's are excited about daily life at school and are authentically engaged by their enthusiastic and inspiring teachers.

"It's a dream job!"

Presenter & PD Leader

As an educator, Felix quickly learned the importance of sharing what works well in the classroom. Becoming part of a professional learning network (PLN) became important to him when he began attending conferences, connecting with other like-minded professionals, and learning from great educators all around the world. Presenting quickly became an enjoyable way for Felix to share and connect. He has now led many workshops, presentations, sessions, panel discussions, courses, and even a couple keynotes.

Feel free to contact Felix to discuss having him come out to present and/or lead professional development at your school or district.

Teacher

A bachelor of Music Education with an emphasis in choral conducting was Felix's entry into education. After three years as a music teacher, he decided to pursue another interest of his and got certified as a computer network engineer. Although he thought he was leaving education for a business career in the computer field, fate had another plan. He ended up teaching computer classes and found a new passion - Educational Technology.

Proud Dad

Felix has two wonderful children with who he enjoys spending time, traveling, & good eats!