As our current families know, Beaver will become a 1:1 laptop community in 2009-10. In meeting the parents of newly admitted students on our re-visit days this month, I’ve explained that becoming a laptop community isn’t a radical change, but instead is intended to make “Beaver to be better at being Beaver.” Students won’t be online every minute of every class, but having laptops will open up channels of communication, collaboration and creativity that weren’t possible before the invention of Web 2.0 applications. Click

This week we had what I feel were the best opening faculty meetings in my (now) 17 years here. Members of our faculty lead workshops on Assessment, All Kinds of Minds and the 9th grade advising program, Best Practices for Collaboration and Web 2.0 and Education. In addition we heard from alumnae Beth Williams ’81 and Louise Russell ’63 on “Diversity as Good Business Sense” and Todd Frye from BCCJ

As progressive educators, we at Beaver continually ask ourselves what really constitutes intelligence and how that impacts learning and teaching. Unfortunately most of the educational establishment remains stuck on using various forms of standardized testing to quantify intelligence, even though it flies in the face