Blog

One of the things that I love best about being an educator is the start of the new school year. I know of few professions where one routinely gets the chance to hit the reset button. Like many of you, I will be meeting a whole new group of students in the next few weeks as the Fall semester begins, and it is during this brief period of time between the end of the summer and the start of the new school year that I become both reflective and forward thinking.

As I ponder where the summer has gone, I would like to paraphrase the song “Summer Nights” from the movie Grease, “Tech this summer, had me a blast. Tech this summer, happened so fast.” While I was recharging my mental batteries, I spent a great deal of time this summer revising and updating my website, exploring multiple resources related to teaching kids to create with code (http://code.org and http://madewithcode.com), developing a deeper understanding of online games (including Minecraft), and finally obtaining the 2048 tile. As I look at this list, I now have a pretty good idea of where my time went.

As I look forward to the 2014-2015 academic year, I am extremely excited about a number of things that are happening at NAGC related to technology. First, the new and improved NAGC website looks FANTASTIC! I want to personally commend the staff and everyone who worked on creating the new site. It is well organized and has a very modern look and feel. I am also happy to report that there is this new blog section of the website - where you are right now! I hope these diverse blog posts will serve to increase the communication and readership by all of the members of NAGC. With this endeavor, NAGC has taken a major technologically sound step forward. However this is only the first major step.

I am pleased to announce that a Technology Education and Gifted Task Force is currently being assembled and is charged with identifying models and resources, and building partnerships that position NAGC and gifted education professionals for relevance and success within the changing social media and technology education landscape. The Technology Education Task Force will:

• examine how other organizations define success in this area,
• identify possible partnerships with other professional organizations,
• identify ways to better or best leverage social media to build member-constructed content and learning communities, and
• explore possibility of crowd sourced reviews of apps, online content, learning resources, online classes, etc. specifically for gifted students.

An exploratory committee has been formed to chart some possible directions for the task force. However, wider participation and insight is greatly needed. Whether you are a classroom teacher building blogs with your students, a member of an engaged state or national technology organization, a prolific user of social media, a technology researcher, or even someone who is concerned about how technology is -- or is not -- being used with gifted children, then your help is needed. If you are interested in volunteering to serve on this task force, please send me an email. Together we will be able to leverage the power of technology and ensure that NAGC will remain the leader in providing teachers with resources to best meet the needs of their gifted and talented students.

Enjoy what may be left of your summer and have a fantastic start to your new year! I hope to see you all in Baltimore in November.