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Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Category: Learning Community (page 1 of 3)

Making Thinking Visible via Explain Everything and Google Drive (Toolkit Tip)

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Having students use a screencasting app like Explain Everything (EE) is a wonderful way for technology to modify and redefine tasks. Screencasting allows students to communicate using their spatial, artistic, visual, speaking, media, design, and other skills. Creativity comes into play as students find ways to make their thinking visible.

A barrier to use is getting the screencast videos to the teacher or other students for review. Fortunately, my new learning community at Washington International School (WIS) has a very talented Learning and Technology Coordinator at the Upper School. His name is Richard Anderson, and he has created a treasure trove of online tutorials. It is worth subscribing to his YouTube channel.

In his video entitled “iPads, Google Drive and Explain Everything,” Richard demonstrates how to set up shared Google Drive folders with students and how students can connect to Google Drive through Explain Everything. Richard shows how students can open assignments within EE from the teacher’s shared Drive folder to complete the EE assignment. They then use EE’s embedded Google Drive button to share their video with their teacher. This is incredibly useful.

As one of my new goals with this blog is to share how teachers at WIS use the various pedagogies involved with Project Zero, do look for more videos from Richard and podcasts that I will share via the Edtech Co-Op podcast.

 

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Ed Tech Co-Op Podcast Season 2 in Review

Edtech

We just wrapped up season 2 of the Ed Tech Co-Op podcast. It was a terrific year of learning and sharing with our resourceful and thoughtful guests. If you have yet to listen to any shows, look at the list of topics and themes we covered below. The season ended with three shows featuring leaders in the field of educational technology as we followed up on our mid-season shows with Peter Papas, Jeff Nugent, and Sara Dexter. So, if you also follow Jeff Utecht, Vinnie Vrotny, or Patty Carver, go to the Ed Tech blog or subscribe via iTunes.

Mark and I are excited to start season 3 in the fall. We will have an exciting announcement to share as we also will introduce a new theme to be covered during the upcoming year.

Here are topics that were covered, whether in individual or series of shows, during this past season:

Pre-service Teacher Preparation
Piloting a 1:1 Tablet Program and Writing Your Own Textbook
Using Evernote for Class Notetaking & Reflections from the Flipped Classroom Conference
Multimedia Essays in Language Arts
Universal Design for Learning
The ISTE Standards for Coaching
STEM

TPACK, Learning Activity Types & Curriculum Review
The International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme

Team-based Instructional Leadership for Concept-focused Math and Science Education
Blended to Virtual Learning in Secondary Schools and in Higher Education
Teaching for Constructivist Learning

Technology Literacy & Hardware Choices

 

Summer Reading, Writing and Sharing

With summer soon upon us, the students and staff of ACDS will continue their learning by participating in the annual summer reading and writing program. Several students will be sharing their reflections this year via personal blogs. Elizabeth Lockwood, our incredible teacher librarian, put the program together. She is building further community through a blog dedicated to sharing book recommendations.

Whether you already have a summer reading and writing program, go through the Reading and Response Journals site to get some new ideas from Elizabeth.

The ICL and Child Study Team Partnership

I often post here and report through the Edtech Co-Op podcast about my experiences working as a partner with teachers and administrators. A primary collaboration area is having one’s Information and Communication Literacies (ICL) team work with the classroom teachers, the learning support staff, and administrators to review the curriculum.

The ICL team at our school comprises the Tech Director, the Library Media Specialist, and the Instructional Technologist. Besides working to find ways for ICL to enhance student learning, we also look to precisely differentiate the content, process, and products of each unit of study we review. It is beneficial to work with the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach to designing the curriculum for special needs and all student learners.

With this collaborative approach to support learning, the logical next step is to have one’s ICL team join the Student Services Team as they meet to discuss individual student needs or give them access to the digital learning plans/IEPs. Just as the ICL team can access unit plans via one’s online curriculum mapping tools to add their ideas, they could also access individual learning plans (via the Student Information System) to list ways that technology and web resources can be utilized to support the learning needs of each student.

This approach also involves helping students develop their Personal Learning Systems (i.e., personal toolkit) of software, apps, websites, widgets, etc using Symbaloo, creating a Google Site with links to helpful websites, finding apps, and adding shortcuts to one’s mobile device, etc. are a few ways to create this personal learning system.

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Festival of Learning

Learning should be celebrated and thematic. So how about having a “Festival of Learning” with all the grade levels of one’s school researching the same topic in a week-long learning celebration culminating in a greater community dinner where students share their learning projects?

The Alexandria Country Day School Festival of Learning, led by our librarian, Elizabeth Lockwood, was a wonderful experience this year, especially seeing the older students working with their younger buddies. The theme for the festival this year was endangered species. A new wrinkle to the program was having the Eighth Graders choose to work on one of three projects. The choices were to create artwork around the festival’s theme, work on the newspaper production team to report about the week, or be a member of the video production team in charge of creating a video to educate the community about our Festival of Learning theme.

If this idea of creating a festival of learning interests you and you want to pursue it further, here is how Elizabeth frames the festival’s objective.

The Kindergarten through Seventh Graders used their research to produce books. This project work is directly tied to the English curriculum goal of having students better understand the nature of non-fiction text. The Eighth Grader’s collaborative work on the newspaper and video demonstrated the value of using technology in a team and project-based learning effort. So many skills were used, from organization, planning, communication, teamwork, sound design, etc., and student engagement to make the depth of commitment to the week of learning well worth it.

“The Festival of Learning is a year-long, school-wide exploration of a single topic that celebrates our world, its cultures, diversity, and rich legacies. We can examine a theme in more depth than a single class or grade level curriculum allows. The festival promotes fascinating discovery, interdisciplinary learning, cooperative projects across grades, and involvement from the parents and outside community. The culmination is an intensive “festival” of activities the week before Spring break. Each year’s topic, chosen by the faculty, enriches the curriculum by allowing our school community to explore together an aspect of our world we may not otherwise fully realize or appreciate. We strive to help students appreciate their roles in a larger world beyond the classroom, and to generate excitement for learning.”

To learn more about the activities and projects from the Festival of Learning, look at the posts from our school blog. Just scroll down the page for multiple posts displaying examples of student learning. And here is a link to Elizabeth’s website for the festival from last year when the theme was water.

A School Making the Shift

Second graders designing exhibits for the National Museum of American History, teachers dressing up as endangered species telling their stories as a part of a school-wide thematic festival of learning, and middle schoolers using the arts and multimedia to share their understanding of To Kill A Mockingbird are just a few of the highlighted instructional strategies and assessments used at Alexandria Country Day School.

My school’s blog, Adaptive and Innovative Practices at ACDS, is packed with excellent lesson and unit plan ideas this week. The blog aims to share with our parents, but it is time to share with a broader audience. Take a look!

The Instructional Technologist and Teacher Librarian: PD to the Classroom

With the Blogosphere and Twitterverse filled with discussions about how to shift schools, focus on 21st-century skills, create and promote learning communities, provide PD, etc., it seems like an opportune time to revisit the roles of the instructional technologist and teacher librarian as leaders and change agents in our schools. We planned on making this a topic in an upcoming EdTech Co-op podcast, but a blog post leads me to share some ideas now.

Tim Holt’s recent post about the role of professional trainers and speakers hit a nerve for many folks and has led to many discussions about how to bring about change in our schools. My response is to put forth the instructional technologist and librarian as key leaders in schools who should follow up on professional development (PD) activities to facilitate the action steps to connect the learning from the PD to the learning in our classrooms. 

As for the considerable topic of shifting our schools, Jeff Utecht and I produced a podcast all about Shifting Our Schools. Please look at the show notes, as our guests brought many helpful ideas. Only the latest podcasts are still accessible via iTunes.

While Tim argues that the educational gurus should offer us the how-to’s on how to shift our schools, the pushback is that each school is different, and the road maps must be individualized. I agree with this and see that there are many ways to offer professional development for our learning communities. Still, the key is the follow-up after the PD, which is not the responsibility of PD providers. Whether one brings in educational trainers, sends staff off to conferences, runs book discussions, or has teachers take courses, the bottom line is that there are many choices and that each educator should be empowered to design and build their professional learning network as so many in the blogosphere promote.

It is then up to the school’s leadership to create the mechanism involving the use of time and support to empower the staff to develop the “how to” to take PD learning into the classrooms. Administrators provide this essential leadership, but the instructional technologist and teacher-librarian often are the doers, either working via the curriculum review process or collaborating individually or with groups of teachers who turn the PD into action.

Whether you call your school instructional technologist a technology integration specialist, educational technologist, learning coach, or whatever, it is crucial to realize what this well-skilled leader can do for your school. One can review the posts and articles by library leaders to paint the picture of the modern teacher librarian, or you could review the skill set and 21st-century vision of my wife, the library media specialist at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

To paint the picture of an instructional technologist, here is a MindMeister mind map I created several years ago for a conference in China where the participants helped build out the IT/ET job description, including experience and skill set for a 21st-century instructional technologist. Hopefully, it provides a discussion point on whether you have an instructional technologist or want to hire one but need a job description.

We will soon be discussing this topic further in the Edtech Co-op podcast.

Parenting in Our Digital Age

family tech

I am a real believer in communicating to our school community about how our instructional technologists and librarians are providing the tools and various literacies (i.e., information, media, design, etc.) to help students attain the learning outcomes of the curriculum. Whether it be through blogs, weekly emails, media sites sharing student work or parent coffees, the members of one’s Information and Communication Literacies (ICL) team do need to provide the leadership to share with students, teachers, and parents how the ICL skills make a difference in student learning while also supporting parents as they decide how their children use technology in the home.

I bring up this point as our ICL team, the school counselor, and the middle school principal recently offered a parent coffee on parenting in our digital age. We gave a presentation back in the Fall, but it needed to be more of a shared discussion for our Spring presentation, especially parent-to-parent on Internet use, cell phones, texting, etc. While a part of the discussion should be about technology, parenting and the importance of good family communication should be at the center. 

We are fortunate to have an excellent counselor in Carla Belsher, who, from the start of the year, has provided the insights and resources to empower our parents to communicate better and partner with their children in making decisions about technology and social networking tools.

The coffee was well-attended, and as we hoped for, the parents provided excellent insights from their experiences. The discussion offered parents of younger students valuable real parenting experiences while giving our parents of older children several ideas on how they might work with technology use in their families.

In the Fall, we created a Web site listing multiple resources for parents to gather information. We shared our belief that creating a family technology use plan is one way to provide the structure and guidance for families to educate better and manage how everyone uses technology. The parent resources site also links to an online version of our Fall presentation. While cyberbullying is a topic of concern for our community that is also often in the press, our online presentation connects to the importance of teaching children about privacy and how it is a very different world today, with so many children having an online presence.

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Class Size & the Social Animal: The Diane Rehm Show

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Diane has two terrific interviews and discussions this week about education.

David Brooks shares insights about his new book The Social Animal in an interview that connects to so much of our teaching with our students. He shares his review of scientific, psychological, and sociological studies to stress the importance of understanding emotion and how it interacts with reason. David points out that many of our schools need to work to develop the emotional skills and other habits of mind that our young people need to live healthy lives. Check out the podcast directly from Diane’s site or via iTunes.

Diane connects to the political events in Wisconsin and other states where budget tightening will mean fewer teachers and more students per classroom. She looks into both sides of the discussion about student class size and achievement.

Check out the podcast directly from Diane’s site or via iTunes.

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Teaching Resources for Texting and Social Networking

LG Text

Working at a new school in a new country offers many learning opportunities. At Alexandria Country Day School, I am learning about our school community’s culture and the broader perspective of living in the USA after many years working internationally. As an educator and a parent, I am very interested in the world my students and two sons are dealing with in and out of school and on the Web.

Our middle school staff worked with Rosalind Wiseman last week to further develop our advisory program’s curriculum. While not working directly with technology, we discussed the effects of our students using technology through texting and other communication tools.

Rosalind has published several books on teens that offer ideas for educators and parents to develop strategies to help teenagers deal with their world. Rosalind also blogs and posts videos on her site. She doesn’t hold back and deals with issues head-on.

An added resource Rosaland shared with us is a series of YouTube videos that LG contracted actress Jane Lynch to do. The videos entertain and get the message across about how texting can affect our children and our families. It reinforces my belief that educators and parents must further teach the skill/habit/quality of being present with others.

For more information on technology and its effects on us, check out the New York Times series “Your Brain on Computers.”

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