MAIS
MEDITERRANEAN ASSOCIATION OF INTERNATIONAL SCHOOLS Apartado 80 - 28080 Madrid, Spain Fax: (3491) 357-2678 Web Site: http://www.mais-web.org E-mail: rohale@mais-web.org
Optimal Match/Technology Conference Information Rabat Morocco, April 12-15, 2007
Hosted by the Rabat American School
Make plans now to attend the upcoming Combined Optimal Match/Technology Conference, April 12-15th hosted by the Rabat American School. By combining the two conferences, preK-12 teachers, counselor’s technology specialists and administrators will be able to explore in depth the crossover and connections between the two fields. Presenters include: Dr. James Grant is a professor of education and a consultant where he teaches children with special needs and "at-risk" students. William S. (Bill) Reeder is new the Director of Assessment, Assistive Technology and Support Services for the Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia. Jeff Sisk is a Technology Specialist for Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia. Nancy Icke is a Technology Resource Specialist for Fairfax County Public Schools. Tammi Sisk has been School Based Technology Specialist for 7 years in Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia. Jeremy Schwartz, technology integration specialist at the American School of Madrid. The conference format, will allow for the special needs experts to co-present with the technology specialists. Our expert presenters have planned and worked together in the US prior to coming to Rabat. Delegates will have the opportunity to listen to speakers address today's major issues in the fields of special education and technology, as well as to attend smaller break-out sessions addressing specific topics followed by hands-on opportunities in the computer labs. Copies of the adaptive software programs will be given to participants. Conference delegates will also have the opportunity to enjoy the cultural and historical richness of Rabat. Below you may find preliminary information about the Conference. Keynote speaker and presenter Bios are also included.
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Hotel Information
Ibis Moussafir Rabat (Three minutes by bus from RAS) bus to school & activities provided 32-34, rue Abderrahmanne El Ghafiki place de la Gare RABAT - AGDAL - 10000 - RABAT - MOROCCO
Tel : (+212)37/774926 Fax : (+212)37/774903 The Ibis Moussafir Rabat hotel is located in the city centre, 20m from the railway station, in the residential and administrative district of Agdal. 15 min from the beach, the zoological gardens and the village of Moroccan arts, it is only 10 min from the Palais Royal, the Kasbah des Oudayas and the Mohamed V mausoleum. It has 95 airconditioned rooms and a restaurant, a terrace, a bar serving snacks 24/24, and 2 meeting rooms for The prices for the rooms including a buffet breakfast are: Suite: 732 Dh (approx. $85) for one person and 789 Dh (approx. $92) for two. These rooms only have king size beds. Double room: 510 Dh (approx. $ 59) Single room: 453 Dh (approx. $ 53) They have 3 breakfast services: 4:00 am to 6:00 am: 6:00 am to 10:30 am and 10:30 am to 12:00pm For those who would like to have diner at the hotel on Friday, the average price for a 3 course menus is 130 Dh (approx. $15). The deadline to reserve without payment of the first night is March 1. Website: Hotel Ibis All reservations for the hotel must be guaranteed by a credit card and must be made through the Ikhlas Ouazzany, Technology Coordinator, RAS iso@ras.ma no later than February 25th. Rooms allocated to MAIS at this price are limited and will be booked on a first come, first serve basis. Transportation from/to Airport-Hotel: to be arranged for delegates
Proposed Draft Social & Cultural Program
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Thursday Evening: Cocktails Chez Johnson’s Friday and Saturday: Keynotes, workshops and Lunches at RAS Saturday: end workshops at 3:30 to depart at 4:00 to the Tour Hassan, Mausoleum Med V, Oudayas, and Shopping in Consul Street. Diner in a Moroccan restaurant Plan to arrive by late afternoon Thursday for the opening Cocktail. The conference will end mid-morning on Sunday, following the wrap up. The conference will be held during tourist & conference season and we need your rooming information as soon as possible. Conference Fees: there is no fee for member schools lunches, coffee breaks, or the opening cocktail. Non-Member School Conference Fees: Euros 150.00 includes lunches and coffee breaks Optimal Match Reimbursement: MAIS, as in past years, will use Optimal Match grant funds to help assist with the costs of the Optimal Match conference and thus allow more members to attend. There is no conference registration fee for MAIS members. Each member school sending a delegate to the Optimal Match Conference will receive USD $300 reimbursement towards conference expenses. Tech. Specialist Activities: Focus workshops and roundtable discussions O M Specialist Activities: Focus workshops and roundtable discussions Bios & Workshops: Below are Keynote speaker and Guest presenter bios. More workshop descriptions to follow We look forward to seeing you in Rabat at the Conference! Please contact the MAIS office by e-mail or fax if you have any further questions.
Optimal Match & Technology Presenter Bios
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Keynote Speakers
Dr. James Grant earned his Ph.D. in Learning Disabilities at the University of Michigan where he studied with Dr. William Cruickshank. He has also worked and published with Dr. Doris Johnson of Northwestern University. He holds a masters degree from Western Michigan University in learning disabilities and emotionally disturbed. He has been a professor of education at Grand Valley State University for the past twenty-five years where he founded and continues to direct several clinics for children of all ages in literacy including mathematics. He is a consultant to several school districts in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he actually teaches children with special needs and "at-risk" students. He is a board member of the Michigan Branch of the International Dyslexia Association and a past President of that association. He has also served on the board of the Learning Disabilities Association of Michigan and been a featured speaker at IDA and LDA international conferences. Keynote Preliminary Draft Concept Dr. James Grant, In the area of learning disabilities, the hot topic is Response To Intervention (RTI). This is a new way of identifying students with learning disabilities. The discrepancy model has been used for quite some time. This new model has implications for school psychologists, general education teachers, and special education teachers. This RTI model is sometimes referred to as the three tiered model. The first tier of instruction is your core curriculum in literacy. Teachers should be monitoring each student's progress in the five "big ideas" of lliteracyphonemic awareness, alphabetic phonetic principles, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Students who are not making adequate progress as defined by meeting the benchmarks in the "big ideas" for each grade, are assigned to tier two. In this tier of instruction, the student should receive an additional 30 minutes of small group instruction beyond the 90 minutes of recommended instruction in tier 1. This instruction may be delivered by the special educator or someone who is trained to deliver explicit, and systematic instruction in the five big ideas. Again the progress of each student is measured and for those students still not making progress, tier 3 instruction is recommended. These are the students who would most likely be classified as students with learning disabilities. The measure most commonly being used to measure the five big ideas is the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) William S. (Bill) Reeder is the new the Director of Assessment, Assistive Technology and Support Services for the Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia. Prior to assuming this position Bill was the Fairfax Coordinator of Assistive Technology for over 16 years, served as Co-Chair of Fairfax County's Strategic Technology Planning Council, has consulted for other US school systems and for the US Department of State, Office of Overseas Schools. Keynote Preliminary Draft Concept Bill Reader, Technology Integration: the Good, the Bad, and Just Don't Do This! The vision of technology integration has evolved into practice. He will show some video, amusing pictures, leaving you with some ideas of the best (and worst) practices in the world of Pre-K-12 technology.
Ken Paynter is in his third year as the Director of Information Technology at Severn School (a 6-12 college preparatory school in Maryland, USA), while he is also in his fourth year as the Project Manager of the NESA 4
Virtual School - a position he assumed while working as Technology Coordinator at AIS Israel in Tel Aviv. Before his career in education began in 1981, he worked as a factory and farm laborer, and as a piano technician/tuner and musician (still occasionally playing the string bass). Mr. Paynter received his BS in Elementary Education and taught fourth grade for fifteen years, all the while becoming increasingly interested and experienced in the many ways in which computer technology could be used to the advantage of all the members of an educational community. Seriously bitten with the "tech bug," he became a middle school computer teacher, and then a network manager before he moved to AIS-Tel Aviv. His classroom tenure, combined with specialized technical training and experience, has proven invaluable in the planning, development, and implementation of educational technology initiatives. nvsproject@gmail.com . Keynote Ken Paynter The World Virtual School Project is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State Office of Overseas Schools to assist participating schools and regions in terms of curriculum quality and consistency, opportunities for collaboration, progressive professional development, and resiliency in the face of natural or man-made emergencies. This unique project is premised on the assumptions that… · schools value the integration of relevant and effective online resources for their varied learning communities; · schools value working regionally to collaborate and to share perspectives and methodologies, and to consider and nurture best practices; · schools value their integrity in the face of adversity, and seek cost-effective and reliable means of assuring continuity of operations. Building upon the success of the NESA Virtual School - a robust consortium of schools who are cost-sharing and co-managing an enterprise level Blackboard service - this World Virtual School initiative intends to gather representatives from the eight major international school regions to focus on general principles and practices related to stand-alone and shared virtual learning environments, with a eye towards the possibility of further developing regional consortia using online vehicles such as Moodle or Blackboard
Guest Presenters
Nancy Icke is a Technology Resource Specialist for Fairfax County Public Schools. She initiated a speech recognition pilot ten years ago for Fairfax students and co-authored the curriculum guide, Writing By Dictation. Nancy has shared her knowledge and expertise in the area of speech recognition at state, national, 5
and international conferences. She is also an advisor to the Renaissance Technologies Board in the area of portable word processing. Jeff Sisk is a Technology Specialist for Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia. He has trained a broad range of students and teachers in classroom technology integration in secondary schools. He also taught Algebra 1, Earth Science, World History, and US History as a high school teacher. Jeff is an adjunct instructor at George Mason University and holds an Ed.S. in Instructional Technology and an M.Ed. in Special Education. Tammi Sisk has been School Based Technology Specialist for 7 years in Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia where she has trained and supported teachers and students at both the elementary and secondary level. At the beginning of her career she was an elementary school teacher. Tammi also teaches technology courses for the Fairfax County Academy. She holds a M.Ed. in Instructional Technology with a focus on Instructional Design. Jeremy Schwartz, Technology Integration Specialist at the American School of Madrid
Is finishing his 6th year as a faculty member of the high school Science Department at the American School of Madrid, Spain. He also works as a technology integration specialist with both faculty and students at ASM. Previously, Mr. Schwartz has worked as a high school and middle school science and math teacher in Valencia, Spain and Santa Rosa, California. He earned a B.S. from the University of California in Berkeley and a M.S.T. from the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Classroom and Online Learning: Innovative Trends in Multimedia Lesson Delivery Jeremy Schwartz, American School of Madrid Participants will learn how to integrate multimedia presentations into their classrooms and online sites (Moodle, Blackboard, etc.) in order to better engage student attention and learning. Some of the topics to be demonstrated and discussed are field trip activities using digital images, multimedia homework revision and worksheet completion, video streaming and editing, interactive web pages (websites without text), and multimedia assessment tools. Teachers will learn how routine tasks can be integrated into Microsoft PowerPoint presentations to stimulate student interest. This session will include several demonstrations showing how creative multimedia presentations can be tied to any curricular content area. Additional topics related to software, hardware and network integration will be examined in the context of setting up a classroom for this form of lesson delivery.
Presentations from: Fairfax County Public Schools presenters
Confirmed: 1. * Interactive Web Resources that Support the Secondary Math and Science Curriculum 2. * Making PowerPoint Dynamic! (In description – Using dynamic hyperlinks and digital images, audio and video) 3. * SOS! (SOftware for Struggling Writers) 6
4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
* SMARTer Lessons = SMARTer Students” (A session on SMARTnotebook software) * What in the World are Blogs and Wikis? * Speech recognition: you can talk to your computer, but will it listen? * Word processing on the go! New strategies and tips for portable word processing * Building background knowledge in core content areas for diverse learners
Additional possibilities: 9. Using Manipulatives and Alternative Algorithms to Reach Struggling Math Students 10. Geometer’s Sketchpad for Elementary Teachers 11. Interactive Web Resources that Support the Elementary Curriculum 12. Digital Story Telling 13. Using Blackboard.com to Instruct and Assess 14. Using Graphic Organizers to Facilitate Visual Learning Possible Presentations: Dr. James Grant He may provide specific training in at least three of the five measures that are considered to be critical- phoneme segmentation fluency, nonsense word fluency, and oral reading fluency. These measures are available on-line at no cost except the paper for printing. I my also speak about interventions that could be used for each of the five big ideas. These topics are probably most relevant to teachers in the early grades and special education teachers who are teaching any age students how to read He will also present information on written expression as I have done the last two years in Lisbon, and Madrid. He may also present on mathematics. I speak about place value, rounding, estimating, mental math, and computation. He uses concrete materials to demonstrate the teaching of these concepts. He can follow this up with some suggestions for teaching math facts to the automatic level. Finally, I have also been explaining how to teach linear algebra through the use of a published material called Hands-on-Equations. The demonstrations show the teachers how they could teach linear algebra with most any material that they had in their room. These are some suggestions, but I would be interested in knowing if the teachers or schools in your area have communicated with you about any needs that they have. If so, I could attempt to tailor my presentation(s) to those needs What are the specific needs of your school? Email or Fax to Reina O’Hale We look forward to seeing you in Rabat the Conference! Please contact the MAIS office by e-mail or fax if you have any further questions. Best regards, Reina
Optimal Match/Technology Conference Registration and Hotel Form Each Individual Registrant: Please complete the following form and return ASAP to the MAIS office. Fax: 0034 91 357 2678 or e-mail at: rohale@mais-web.org 7
Name of Participant: __________________________Position__________ __________ School: _________________________________________________________________ Phone: ________________ Fax: _______________ E-mail: _______________________ Nationality/Passport Number: _______________________________________________ I will be arriving on flight: __________________ on airline: _______________________ Day of Arrival: ______________________ Time of Arrival: _______________________ I will be departing on flight: __________________ on airline: _____________________ Day of Departure: ____________________ Time of Departure: ____________________ Hotel All reservations for the Hotel must be guaranteed by a credit card and must be made through the Ikhlas Ouazzany, Technology Coordinator, RAS iso@ras.ma Fax: 212 37671 no later than February 25th.
Number of rooms needed: ____________________ Type of Room:____________________ (Single/ Double) Roommate________________________________________________________ Credit Card Number __________________________________________ Exp. Date__________________________
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