#CCSDTech: An Award-Winning School Year

The Cherry Creek School District's Department of Instructional Technology ended our year with a bang at Schoology's NEXT 2014 conference held here in Denver at The Curtis Hotel on June 24 and 25.  The conference was a fabulous way to reflect on the successes of this school year.  It was also a perfect way to get geared up for next school year at the same time.  From finally meeting the people at Schoology who we had connected with virtually during the year, to hearing AMAZING keynotes from Schoology's CEO and co-founder Jeremy Friedman, Alan November, and Jennie Magiera, to presenting, representing, and learning throughout the conference, and connecting with other Schoology users from throughout the world NEXT 2014 was a powerful experience to say the least.

And I haven't even mentioned the really good part yet.

Schoology gave some awards to a handful of select educators for their efforts in using and creating capacity with Schoology.  Our favorite learning management system also gave a District of the Year award.  That district was Cherry Creek Schools.

Photo courtesy of fellow CCSD Tech colleague, Sherri Clemens.

We were so excited, proud, and humbled to receive this honor from a learning management system that has 5,000,000+ current users and projects they'll have 9,000,000+ by the end of 2014.  We also recognized the amount of work and passion so many talented and passionate CCSD people put in to help make this happen as well.  From our school board (who approved the purchase of  18,000+ Chromebooks so CCSD students could access Schoology) to our network admins (who made sure our teachers and students had a network designed for seamless Internet access throughout each and every day) to our PowerSchool administrative team (who ensured the information gathered in Schoology goes directly to our student information system) to our teachers and district instructional leadership (who were willing to try out yet another way to make their learning environments more dynamic) to so many others.  This was a total team effort.  There is absolutely no doubt that we made this happen together.

So what's next?  More (4,000+) Chromebooks for our elementary schools, diving deeper into our current Schoology use, and much, much more.  The work is always far from "done."  

The 2013-2014 school year was a successful one.  We're looking to make the 2014-2015 even bigger and better than last year.  This is going to be a pretty large challenge, but we like challenges.  It's part of what we do.

Schoology highlighted their award winners in a blog post here.

Check out Schoology's Storify from the NEXT 2014 conference here. 

Follow our ongoing CCSD Tech journey via Google+ and Twitter on Tagboard here. 

This post is cross-posted in Jay's personal blog.  Click here to visit Jay's blog.