Sharing Apps with the School Board

The instructional technologist team feels that it is important to ensure that our school board remains updated about the progress of our iPad initiative. One way that we are reaching out and communicating with our school board is a series we named "What's APPening in Anderson One". 

Our school board has the confidence in our students, teachers, and administrators to approve the investment of going 1:1 this year, so we want them to feel a part of every step we take.

Our first school board meeting visit was at the end of July. We created all of our presentation materials on the iPad to demonstrate the power of the device. First we created an iMovie highlighting pictures and quotes from our June professional development conference. We shared the movie on the projector. Then we created a Pic Collage using pictures from the day and layered it with quotes we typed up in the Notegraphy app. We used the Aurasma augmented reality app to layer the quotes over the pictures. We mirrored our ipad onto the projector and demonstrated how Aurasma works. Finally we created a QR code that links to our district technology magazine in Flipboard. We printed the code on a graphic "postcard" for each board member. We demonstrated how to use a QR reader app to scan the code and sent them home with their own to try. 

We wanted to make our first board visit a showstopper. I think these apps were great choices because of the "wow" factor. We received very positive remarks and even heard back from one of the board members that went home and scanned the QR code. Overall it was a great success.

Our next meeting is at the end of this month. By then we will have rolled out devices to all of our high schools so we will have pictures and quotes from those days. We plan to use Adobe Voice to narrate the pictures and share the excitement of the day. We also hope to show them how they can Air Drop documents for their meetings to the iPad and annotate in Adobe Reader. We created a Save the Date postcard to share advertising our October student app showcase event, Apptoberfest. I'll write another blog post about that as it gets closer.

How do you communicate your technology goals and achievements to your school board? or district administrators? I would love to hear your ideas.