Marlboro Graduate Center
Managing Technology

Greetings Scholars,

My name is Ted Nellen and I will be guiding you through the fourth course of this Marlboro College Persons School program. I am a New York City high school English teacher and staff developer. You can find out more about my work at http://www.tnellen.com/ted/index.html. I have taught this course before and am looking forward to working with you.

I look forward to hearing from you about the direction you would like to take and if what I have planned meets those needs.

Managing Technology 4th Course

In this course I would like to take you from theory to practice. That is actually using this new information in our classrooms as regular practice and beginning the process of morphing from teacher in a traditional classroom to a teacher using technology in a meaningful way. The Overview and direction for each of the three Units follow.

Now I understand this is my design created without a true benefit of where you are or where you want to go. What I need from you are honest evaluations of this design and a quick response as to its appropriateness and ideas and comments on what you believe you will need to make technology seemless and transparent in your classroom.

Unit 1: The Cybrarian: Managing a Technology Project

Overview: In this First Unit, we will be exploring the various ways we can create and manage a web presence which best suits our needs as teachers. For some, it will be the WebQuest, which is an individual unit, on a specific study, in a given period of time. For others, the Cybrary will be more appropriate. Both are useful and all teachers will use both. You will determine this. However, both tools will be explored, one as a major study and the other as a minor study. And, in the middle of all of this, we will explore the myriad ways in which the teacher can deliver this from the tools available to our students. The three topics of study for Unit One are the WebQuest, Communication Tools, and the Cybrary. There is no particular order in which they should be studied and they do not need to be studied in isolation. You may approach them in your own way. Please pay attention to the activities for each and partake in the discussion for each often.

Unit 2: The Netizen: Laws and Rights

In this unit, you will examine the very tricky waters of policy, law, and contract rights as they relate to Cyberspace and your use of it in the school.

Unit 3: The Cyber School: What's Next

In this final unit, you will consider what you did for yourself in Unit One and what you discovered about the law in Unit Two and begin considering how you can join forces with your colleagues to create a collective unit and what I call critical mass in your school to help it jump from the last century into the current century. Just as you learned how to become a cyber teacher in the earlier units, in this unit we want to consider the creation of the cyber school.

© Ted Nellen 2002