I own a calendar and I am familiar without how it works. Despite that, September snuck up on me. It’s only the third day of school and I’m already swamped. That said, I’m excited about the number of awesome initiatives we have going on at the Scholars’ Academy.

I’d love to say this list is exhaustive, but it’s probably not:

• We are providing each and every student in the seventh grade with an iPad to use in school.
• We will also provide each sixth grader with a Kindle that they will be permitted to take home.
• Each classroom—aside from the seventh grade for obvious reasons—will get around six iPads. The original idea is that there would be around one for every table. Theoretically, I can increase this number if I prioritize based on academic subject.
• In the eleventh and twelveth grades, students taking certain advanced placement courses will be participating in the New York City Department of Education’s iLearnNYC pilot. Students will be enrolled in blended learning classrooms where they will do a portion of their coursework online and a portion of it in a traditional classroom environment. We did this last year and our students received higher scores on the AP exam than previous cohorts that went completely the traditional route.
• We are participating in a pilot using SAFARI Montage, a digital media server loaded to the brim with educational content from well-known vendors.
• We’ll be completing our initiative to put a SMART Board with speakers and a projector arm in ever classroom in the school. I’m not the biggest advocate of SMART Boards, but I do thinkt hat easy access to a projector and speakers is important.

Those are the broad strokes. There are lots of other nuances (e.g. I’ve recently upgraded our Xserve to Mac OS X Lion server and I’m pretty excited about some of the possibilities there). In addition, we’ll be continuing with our initiatives from last year. We rely heavily on the Google Apps for Education infrastructure. I rolled it out during my first week on the job last year and in the relatively short time I’ve been at the Scholars’ Academy, it’s become the foundation for most of our collaboration.

In addition, we have our TEAL Lab (five SMART Boards, one room), a brand new music-technology studio, a Tricaster for live streaming events, and we’re trying to implement “digital bulletin boards.”

My goal is to document the process of seeing all of these projects to fruition. Fraser Speirs has documented his experience in rolling out a school-wide iPad program at his school and it’s proven to be an invaluable resource to me at the Scholars’ Academy. My goal is to do my part to add to the cannon. In addition, writing and reflecting about this stuff is essential for me keeping my head wrapped around the task at hand. I’m looking forward to sharing our progress as well as going into the nitty-gritty as to how these initiatives are (or are not) helping or students.