During the week of April 29th, the popular TV Show, LIVE with Kelly and Michael, celebrated the efforts of some of the “Top Teachers” from across America. Lenovo and Intel were excited to be part of this event by highlighting the educational excellence of Rick Zano of Princess Anne High School in Virginia Beach, Virginia as a “Top Teacher”. Mr. Zano was selected based on his creative, innovative and entertaining approach to teaching.
To reward his dedication, Mr. Zano and his school were awarded 30 Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2 tablets. These innovative devices will help drive the EdTech initiatives at Princess Anne High School, and provide the platform for more creativity in education.
When deploying new technology, such as ThinkPad Tablet 2, into educational environments to enable teachers to creatively connect with students in a 1:1 learning environment. One of the most important issues for creative educators that are using technology in new and attractive approaches is to insure that the new solutions can be “team players” in the current IT environment (so they don’t stress the EdTech staff and create new problems that will demand scarce budget resources). One of the benefits of the tablets that were awarded by Kelly & Michael is that they are Windows-based, and can work seamlessly within the current infrastructure. This enables the creativity of the educator to be used more quickly and effectively by the students.
Teacher creativity is a highly desirable commodity and one that can be hard to find. This makes leveraging this creativity more important than ever. And technology can assist this in a couple of important ways.
First, using the internet and the common sharing tools, the creativity of one teacher can be shared in real time across many classes or districts simply and easily. Further, the ability to “self-publish” new and innovative approaches so that they are easily found by other educators creates even more leverage for the creativity of a single individual.
The second way that technology can empower teaching creativity is to enhance the information flow and content that drives the courseware. For example, the newest and latest information or trends can be worked into courseware so that today’s classes come to life using the current events and news that floods the airwaves. Adding this immediacy, often not possible in a traditional textbook-based class will often engage students, and today’s highly connected EdTech environment can provide the input stream that results in raised levels of classroom creativity and applicability.
The value of sponsorship that provides visibility and a platform for recognizing creative teaching and improvement of the education process is quite high. Sharing “best practices” has been a hallmark of successful business organizations, and bringing that same approach to education has many benefits. Clearly Mr. Zano’s approach will expand the thinking of education professionals, and the recognition of this will undoubtedly server other students in other districts very well as we learn from his example!
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