STEM Symposium

Today I attended the Minnesota STEM Symposium at the Science Museum of Minnesota. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. It was interesting to see and hear what teachers and students are doing using some of the technology now available. Many of the "forecasts" for our country and state are predicting shortages in workers trained in high tech careers.

The highlight was Dr. Ioannis Miaoulis, President and Director of the Museum of Science, Boston. He spoke about the ways he is partnering with schools to develop curriculum for learning about how all the "man-made" products in our world are created. I want to find out more about the curriculum and if we might be able to use some of it in St. Paul.

School and Teacher websites

Here at Arlington we have been working on our school website. The "redesign" is pretty much done and looks cool. Now the real work begins as teachers need to add their content to the pages assigned to them. We are going to offer help in a few different ways. The Nov. 9th professional day we are going to have a drop in session for teachers who just need a little help editing the page they created last year. Our own Leslie Y. is also going to come to AHS and give interested staff a workshop on the basics of Urban Planet. There are so many ways teachers, staff, clubs, teams, etc. can use the school website to promote what's going on and have positive free "PR".

I will also be visiting staff to help with individual or department pages. Sometimes people just need a little more help to get the job done, and I hope this will be the catalyst for us to "get 'er done!"

As a part of this program we are also (I think) required to each have and update our own teacher page. By the time this year ends - I think I will be pretty good at the whole Urban Planet thing.