Tomorrow is the day–a group of us from the district are setting out for California to visit six high schools (Palo Alto, Gunn, Harvard-Westlake, Poway, High Tech High, and Mt. Carmel) over three and a half days, and also will be meeting with a staff member from Escondido Charter School for dinner.  In addition, I’ll be visiting two newly remodeled/built school libraries, Canyon Crest Academy and San Dieguito.

We’ll be talking to the schools about innovative ways they provide professional development time to teachers, innovative courses offered, online courses, facility design, mentorships and college partnerships, technology use, senior projects, and more.

A couple of the campuses issue laptops to students, and I’ll be interested in knowing how that works as well.

We’ll be blogging and posting photos all along the way here and on our vision committee blog(www.trends.edublogs.org) and at Joel’s technology blog (www.techxas.edublogs.org).

We are taking along a few geeky gadgets to try too (given the group that is going, is that surprising?)  Joel has secured a temporary trial of a MacBook Pro so we may try to do some video blogs as we go.  And our district technology coordinator  has  two Samsung miniature tablet laptops for us to try.  We’re also taking our digital recorder (an Olympus ws-100) to record conversations or brainstorming — it’ll allow us to make a podcast if we want to.  

All that aside, I’m very excited about this process and what ideas we’ll be able to bring back and share.  Next post….California?