Connecticut Education Takes a(nother) Step Forward

The setting.... the most amazing Thomas Edison Magnet School in Meriden, CT at the Connecticut Educators Computer Association (CECA) annual conference.
On 10/24/05 at approximately 10:30ET, Governor M. Jodi Rell of CT cut a virtual ribbon unveiling the Connecticut Educaton Network - a consortium of schools, libraries and higher education institutions.

The purpose of the ribbon cutting was to announce the interconnection of all the entities with Internet2. Their site CEN (CT Education Network came online with the announcement. The CEN is America's first statewide K12 and higher education network built exclusively using state-of-the-art fiber optic connections.

This (welcomed) event corresponded with my keynote at the 2005 CECA conference.
I can't wait to see what happens as a result of this truly amazing initiative.

Virtually every educator I met during my short time at the CECA conference was energized, focused and impressively innovative. The CECA conference was well run and a great example of how to do a state tech event.

Classroom of My Dreams...

It's been YEARS since my friend Ted Roth and I stumbled through the inaugural "Scrapbook USA" activity on America Online. It was, I believe, one of the first widely supported collaborative writing exchanges using the "new medium" of AOL culminating in a live chat.

It's been YEARS since my buddy George Bagwell (Gwinnett County Schools, GA) and I trotted from school to school evangelizing PrintShop, HyperCard and MECC software on the districts first new Macintosh computers.

It's been YEARS since I wrote the first CNN NEWSROOM activity for Turner Educational Services - a set of activities to accompany a broadcast produced for classroom use.

It's been YEARS since I used DISK MUNCHER to copy 5.25" diskettes at swap meets in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, GA. (Shortly thereafter I woke up and smelled the copyright.)

It's been YEARS since I first plugged my trusty Apple II into a Pioneer videodisc player and spun through a stunning set of images and movies in a Voyage of the Mimi adventure with my middle school Science class students.

It's been TOO MANY YEARS since I stumbled down the steps of the GRAD STUDIES building at the University of Georgia and dropped a set of punch cards. The very same set of cards (about 300 as I recall) that fed a program to the mainframe that crunched survey numbers for a survey I did on "Cassette-based storage systems in Education". (The Commodore PET was back in my dorm room.)

What hasn't changed though, are the wonderful feelings all those experiences brought me in working with technology and kids in the classroom. This year, I was invited back to keynote the most-wonderful CECA conference in Connecticut and in pulling together the latest and greatest, I realized that the classroom of MY dreams is back again - it's the benefit of hanging out with all the amazing educators I've had the pleasure to meet and talk with over all those years and listening to the NEW ideas that jump out of their ever-thinking heads each and every day. Without the visionary folks attending this CECA conference (and state conferences everywhere), our dreams, and those of our students, might be much further away.

Life is good. ;)

Bard