The communities served by Littleton Public Schools are quiet suburbs of metropolitan Denver which can be described as traditional in most senses of the word. This is a community that still holds parades and people come to Main Street to cheer, even in the pouring rain. Local farmers markets are a regular occurrence here and there are still plenty of properties supporting horses and live-stock right in town. Unlike what you might expect based on the stereotypes of communities with traditional values, our district has some amazing stories of 21st Century learning. While much is happening here, I'd like to point out a few bright lights.

Lenski Elementary School is a hotbed for the use of technology in the daily learning exercises of students from Kindergarten through 5th grade. Enter a faculty meeting and you'll hear teachers discussing how to create graphic organizers using presentation software, or how a text-to-table function in a word-processor can really help students see the patterns in their writing. Student work is prolific to the point that every student produces a  binder of products from the computer during the school year. Their philosophy is simple. They don't have the latest software or all the newest gadgets. They focus on the student learning and try to assure that every child has enough access to basic technology to produce high quality work. They make use of any and all computers they can get their hands on and the only other technology they rely upon are document cameras and digital projectors. All this happens because principal Barb DeSpain sets a clear and consistent expectation for her school that technology will be used for powerful learning in every classroom. As a result, their teaching staff are regularly invited to the Technology in Education (TIE) conference to present their practices to colleagues around the region. Their example shows that what matters is not how much technology you have or how new it is what matters is the student work.

At Arapahoe High School, the author of the Did You Know YouTube video, Karl Fisch, works with cohorts of teachers to transform classrooms with technology. But the beginning and the end have very little to do with computers or other forms of technology. Teachers begin with their philosophies of learning and then discuss what kinds of student behaviors they would like to encourage in their classrooms. Then they discuss how technology might facilitate those behaviors and apply the right tools for the job. And when our district Educational Technology Advisory Committee came to visit the school, Arapahoe showcased their end product rather than what they did with technology. They brought students to the meeting and encouraged them to discuss what was different about these classes and what they learned. The results were impressive.

I must share one activity in particular: Blogging A Whole New Mind . Last winter, language arts teachers Anne Smith and Maura Moritz began a book-study with their freshman students on the best-selling book, A Whole New Mind. Their classrooms are equipped with laptops which make use of the wireless networking we've deployed wall-to-wall in every school in the district. So instead of the usual classroom discussions held in a strictly verbal format, the students added live blogging to the mix. While the verbal debate was going on, another text-based stream of thinking was happening simultaneously. The frequency of comments from the students would top 300 comments per hour. Often, threads of discourse would cross out of the blog and into the verbal conversation meaning that even the voices of the quiet students were heard. The amount of discussion possible was suddenly unleashed from the constraints of time and space as commentary would extend long after school and into the evenings online.

But the power of blogging was only one piece of this experience. Over 40 adults from around the world joined in the discussion. The Superintendent, Scott Murphy, and the members of our Board of Education joined the conversation both in person and online. Educators and professionals from around the world listened in using free video streaming tools and the power of those blogs. World-renowned edublogger Will Richardson joined in and so did the author of A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink. At the end of the six-week activity, the students met in the auditorium with Dan Pink in a live video conference using his webcam from home. The convenience factor was high, the cost was marginal… just the cost of access to cyberspace. The learning was unlike anything I have ever seen.

These examples and others across our district have shaped our vision for 21st Century learning. We believe that the place to start is the learning philosophy and not the technology to buy. We believe that it doesn't take the hottest, newest, most expensive array of tools and software to provide a world-class learning environment. We believe instead that equitable and universal access to the interactive web is quite sufficient to build the powerful learning environment. We believe that it continues to be the teachers and the school leaders that ultimately make the difference in transforming classrooms from the 20th to the 21st Century.

There's so much more story to tell. From robotics at Sandburg Elementary to video co-teaching at Heritage High School and Littleton High School to a program for underprivileged kids that provides free computers at Goddard Middle School, great things are happening in our schools. While we continue to hold on to traditional values, we don't limit ourselves to traditional methods and traditional thinking. Every day I see classrooms of innovation, I see learning unleashed and I see hope in abundance.