Blended Bulletin, Issue 12

Cool Tools

Listen Current is a freemium tool that curates interesting public radio stories and provides teaching resources for them. Listen Current organizes the story by subject matter and current events. It offers suggested comprehension and discussion questions for each story. Listen Current also has a partnership with Socrative to provide quizzes for their stories. The paid version allows teachers to create classes and track student progress. The paid version also offers support for ELLs.

Google Art Project is a digital collection of over 200,000 works of art from art galleries and museums around the world. Users can view the art, read pertinent details, and even create their own galleries of interesting pieces. Read below for an idea of how to use this tool in the classroom.

Block Posters is a neat classroom design tool that simply allows you to upload an image and create a poster from it using standard 8.5"x11" paper. If only it laminated, too!

ThingLink is a freemium tool for educators that allows users to upload an image and make it interactive through links. It is hard to explain exactly what this tool is, so a better way to do it is through this example.

Professional Learning

8 things every teacher can do to create an innovative classroom offers ideas about how you can be an innovative teacher by allowing your students to innovate through projects.

In A New Vision to Personalize Writing Instruction, the author discusses one of the frontiers of edtech: writing. Google add-ons Doctopus and Goobric are used as examples of technology that can enhance writing through feedback and revision, but the edtech world is still looking for a more comprehensive strategy.

Caitlin Tucker, edtech teacher and blogger extraordinaire, shares ideas for using Google Art Project in classes other than art: Design a Thematic Art Gallery with Google Art Project.

In early November I had the privilege of attending the Vermont Fest (a 2 day technology festival).  There were break out sessions, a keynote speaker, the "un-convention" sessions, and opportunities to talk one on one and in small groups with experts in different fields.  What I decided to share will be my notes from the 3 sessions I felt were the most useful.

Using Open Educational Resources:An Introduction to Gooru Learning

Opening up choices for students and professional development for teachers

Curriculum Development (takes years to write and roll out)

   Design-develop-implement-monitor-evaluate-renew...repeat cycle

   Compliance vs Fidelity

   Look up Act 46 in Vermont (8 years to create)

   Too slow (18-24 months per subject area)

   Too cumbersome for current context (CCSS, other Standards)

   Expensive

   Development and implementation (look at the gaps)

   Inflexible (standards based vs personalized education)

Open Development Model

   Build curriculum from the ground up (like open source software)

   Connect teachers across schools in a common development platform

   Standards used as a "tagging" scheme

   Closes gab between curriculum design and implementation

   Leverages internet based content

   Minimizes reinventing the development wheel in each building or district

   Serves to expand the curriculum

   Educators own it

Hewlett Foundation- OER

OER Adoption

   Curriculum materials developed using public tax dollars should be licensed for open use (Creative  

   Commons)

   Less expensive to develop

  Better knowledge sharing and development

   Supports personalized learning in depended learning

   Up to date (curriculum and textbook)

   High quality instructional materials to all students

   State and federal policies promoting adoption

In Vermont

   Curriculum development shifting to Cloud based tools

   oercommons.org.  Curriki

   LMS usage increasing

   Connection between external clod based resources and internal local systems (LMS)

   Connect state and regional work (proficiency based learning)

   learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)-a standard for integrating web based tools

LTI

Gooru Learning...look at the California School District

Haiku Learning

Gooru

   You can start fresh or use somebody's presentation

   Slides, videos, pictures,etc

   Custom collections- your content you saved and manage learning, see progress and analytics, etc

Sharing a cMashing it up

   Connects educators I a single ecosystem

   Common communication system and collaboration

   Connecting ecosystems (connecting between districts and state)

   Leveraging content from outside state (use from other states, districts, countries, etc)

   LMS-learning management systems

Hunters/Gatherers of information, lessons, materials, sources, textbooks, etc.

   Collective borrowing/borrowers

   Selective borrowing/borrowers

Federal Government

   OER- you create something for education using federal tax money this will become part of OER (you 

    receive credit)

 We need to look into OER and how schools in CT can support each other.

Overhauling Tired Learning Spaces-A Collaborative Conversation

Look up VITA Learn

Innovative schools changed their work spaces.  (Desks facing forward and teacher desk facing front-no innovation)

   Look at lighting, room color, flooring, etc.

The worse consequence of your best idea

Need to shift your paradigm

Look up Burr and Burton School...Reggio Amilla education Italy

Look up student desks at UConn...what are they called and how much ?  Does UConn help schools purchase chairs?  Grant? Webpage funding?

   School Node Chair with Casters Classroom...the chairs I want

   Can we change the flooring?  Can we change the lighting?  Can we change the paint?  Can we purchase  

    paint?

   paletton.com . Look up site for colors and matching colors.

(Civics and Int Stud- working together, representatives, compromise, vote, debates, elaboration, critical thinking, )

High Tech High School California..design and colors..minimalist

bsdvt.org or wsesu.net

As educators we need to look at the classroom, how it is arranged, and the psychology behind this.  All of this impacts the level of learning in the classroom.

Node Chairs gives you the ability to move chairs into any configuration you and your students would like (at any moment with limited disruptions and complications)

Level Up with Games Based Learning...Engaging students using game based learning and gamification

Goosechase Adventure-digital scavenger hunt with Leadership board (10 teams for free)

7 Principals of Game Like Learning (quest to learn...high school in New York)

   Everyone is a participant

   Failure is re framed as iteration

   Everything is interconnected

   Learning by doing

   Feedback is immediate and ongoing

   Challenge is constant

   Learning feels like play

Essential Play

   People develop problem solving skills, critical thinking, and social skills

   Immersive games enhance these three skills

   How can teachers harness immersive play?  (Immediate feedback)

   Game experience-create or use a game to support students In learning the concepts associated with      probability

   Game, game like, and gamification

Game design

  Start small, redacted, get fancy.  Repeat.

   Create a game using paper, a die, markers, and a dinosaur.

   Game play, board, rules, etc can be modified

   Write code for the game later

Classcraft

   Gamified and game like

Gamified

  Immediate feedback

   Layers over any content area

   Use it anywhere

   Experience feels like play

  Randomness

  Does not replace your classroom

   Time needs to be set aside

   Keep up with rewards or punishments

  Rejection and obsession

  Connecting to academics

Institute of Play (school)

   Print and play games

  

Kahoot

Quizizz

Someday-identity/beyond borders (teacher created)

   In Wiks and Google form

After returning I had my International Studies classes create games, with limited supplies.  We were learning about cooperation, collaboration, and competition.  They had several days to work in groups.  They created the games, rules, cards, money, board, etc.  After 3 days they played their game and one other group's game.  They provided feedback to each other.  They loved this idea and could easily describe how the concepts of cooperation, collaboration, and competition were embedded throughout this lesson.  (These 3 concepts will be part of the underlining themes throughout the year).

As for my classroom I am looking into seeing how I can obtain funding for the Node chairs and possibly paint.  I would like my classes to come up with designs about how the room should look and feel.  This would change the dynamics of the room.  Having the ability to have a variety of seating arrangements in the classroom appeals to me and my students.

 I am looking into open educational resources.  This concept appeals to me.  If all of the teachers in one content area (high school Social Studies) worked collaboratively on a grade specific course we could share the best of all of your work.  This could create a new curriculum with input from every teacher.  We could see what other states are using and modify this to meet our curricular needs.  Think of how powerful this could become.

 

Blended Bulletin, Issue 11

Blended Brags

In Chandler Paradis' AP Lit. & Comp. class at Bulkeley, students are using Edublogs as a means of sharing the reading experience. For each book in the curriculum, Chandler has appointed one student to be a book captain. The book captain is responsible for posting reflections and questions after reading sections of the class text. The rest of the class is responsible for responding to the blog posts with their own thoughts and questions. What transpires is one extremely interesting and entertaining book blog where students are writing with voice while analyzing complex texts. Take a look and feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments on the blog. I'm sure the students would love to see that others are paying attention! Check it out here: AP Lit. & Comp. Book Captains' Club

Professional Learning

In a report published by the RAND Corporation, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, "promising evidence'" is captured to support personalized learning. In a study of 11,000 students, schools that use personalized learning demonstrated greater academic progress than those that do not use personalized learning. In a shift that has lacked the backing of significant quantitative data, these findings could prove to be game-changing.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also put out their Teachers Know Best report about what teachers want and need from digital tools. While there has been great growth with tech integration, I found it very interesting that only 56% of teachers "believe data and digital tools make them better teachers."

Media Usage Highest Among Poor, Minority Youth, Report Finds discusses the LARGE amount of media that our youth consume. Pay careful attention to the limits of this study, especially its method of gathering data.

Personalized Learning, Competency Education Need Policy Support, Group Says summarizes iNACOL's policy recommendations at the national and state level that will help to make Student Centered Learning a reality.

CECA CASL 2015 PART TWO!!!

Diana already posted our notes from the conference! SPOILERS.

But I wanted to respond to what I thought as well. 

The sessions I felt were the most useful and intriguing were the ones on Google classroom. I am excited to use them with the Chromebooks. I wish that we had the passwords so that we could be ready so that I could start with small groups and ease into the whole blended learning. But there are some awesome add ons that would be really useful such as one that converts text to speech (and that would be helpful for my students with disabilities and ELLs). 

One thing I wasn't too keen on was the idea of going completely paperless. While I like the idea of not copying any more papers, I think that our students need the support of writing/annotating on the actual text. And I am wondering how some teachers are doing both.

Oh but the keynote speaker was amazing! She had some great quotes that I HAD to write down! The one that spoke to me the most was "We do not have a technology gap, we have a literacy gap."  She spoke about using the technology to address human rights and provide the best teaching to all students as a tool. It was inspiring and had me and Diana talking all day! We are so excited to get started!

Diana's post with our notes if you wanted to check it out!

A Visit to Intrinsic

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Chicago with my colleague, Kim Childress, and my principal to tour Intrinsic Schools, a charter high school that is reimaging the work of education.  A really well done review of the school - with pictures that help to bring the experience alive - is available here.  Check it out for a deep dive in the vision, values, norms, and systems of the building.  For those without the time to dig into the article, here's my own CliffsNotes version:

Intrinsic was born in 2013 with the vision of creating a personalized, technology-rich learning environment that would truly break the mold of school innovation.  At Intrinsic, math and ELA classes are taught for 90-minutes each day in pods, which may accommodate as many as 60 students served by three teachers (typically two core subject teachers and one special education teacher).  The teachers share an equal role in planning and instruction - with collaborative planning time built into every day - so it's never obvious which students have a disability and which do not.  The pods - which, aesthetically, look nothing like a school - include (ordered from more to less teacher-directed practice) "the Board", "the Ocean",  "the Shade", and "the Coastline". Respectively, these spaces allow for large group direct instruction, teacher-led small group discussion, structured group work/projects, and independent work on Chromebooks.  Students transition between different stations according to particular classroom norms and systems established and explicitly taught by teachers in each pod, with students usually moving through three of the four stations on any given day.  The rotation of stations - and how students travel among them - is determined through a wealth of diagnostic data, that helps the school group students based on academic need.  Students remain in these groups for a semester, in general, before groups may be reassigned based on performance.  This allows for a highly-differentiated experience for students and eases some of the burden of differentiating every classroom practice for teachers.  Instead, a teacher might differentiate the direct instruction piece in three different ways, but will not be responsible for any other part of the lesson (since those are taken on by the other teachers in the room).  This model is not used for social studies or science classrooms; instead, those classes meet in more traditional classroom spaces with the "normal" student-to-teacher ratio.  

Okay, that's the context.  Now, a few takeaways:

(1) Social Studies in a Blended Space: As a social studies teacher, I've been struggling quite a bit to locate high-quality instructional content to use in a blended environment.  To the extent that these resources exist, most are either developmentally inappropriate or intolerably boring.  While I didn't find a panacea at Intrinsic, I did have the opportunity to chat with a social studies teacher to learn about their social studies blended learning practices, which was refreshing and rewarding.

(2) Collaboration: One of the many strengths of Intrinsic was its schedule, which afforded tremendous opportunities for vertically aligning curriculum and engaging in collaborative planning. Collaboration is a norm of the building - both for students and for teachers.  The effects are palpable: lessons were fluid, transitions were seamless, and expectations were uniformly high.  As we build out our own models of blended learning, I suspect ongoing collaboration will be essential to our collective success.

(3) Removing the Barriers: As a school built on access to technology, Intrinsic works incredibly hard to sustain fully functioning wi-fi access.  Indeed, it treats access problems with the precision of a surgeon.  For instance, the building's IT coordinator noted that this year teachers were "experiencing connectivity problems in the first five minutes of the day, as everyone was logging in." Within a day or two, he had identified and implemented a solution, remarking that "we don't have time to waste." It is this incredible attention to detail, he said, that has allowed the model to flourish.

(4) Culture, Culture, Culture... did I mention culture?: For me, the most important takeaway from the trip was that a prerequisite to an effective rollout of blended learning is establishing an incredibly strong school culture and climate.  The experiences of Intrinsic are particularly illustrative here since their opening was anything but smooth.  According to the assistant principal, in year one as many as 80 percent of the students made little to no academic progress because of the permissive school culture.  Students were rarely held accountable for their actions and, consequently, used their devices and their time in all of the wrong ways. Recognizing these problems, Intrinsic's administration directed their energy and attention at establishing and maintaining high behavioral expectations in year two.  The results were obvious: during my visit, I didn't see a single cell phone in the building (students caught with their phone receive a 3 hour detention) and witnessed students RUNNING to their desks so they didn't earn a demerit (4 of those in a 2-week period will also earn one a 3 hour detention).  The consequences for the instructional environment were obvious:  students were genuinely on-task all of the time.  As I observed students along "the Coastline", I saw all of them accessing their personalized learning path, tracking their progress, and working diligently without any self-induced distractions. Students at "the Board" were deeply engaged in the content - not because it was particularly engaging, because it wasn't - but because there was a real culture of achievement in the building. While the rules were strict, the environment was not stifling.  In fact, it was quite the opposite: intellectually alive, supportive, and focused on success.  As one student told me, "while I sometimes do hate the rules, I also know they're there to help us achieve. It's cool to be a nerd at this school."

"Cool to be a nerd."  I think that says it all.   

CECA CASL 2015

It was very rewarding to attend a conference with another teacher who shares your students.

Originally we had chosen different sessions. However, after attending the first one together... well it was just life changing. We took notes collaboratively use Microsoft online and were suggesting things to each other back and forth without being distributive to the other participants. Here is a glimpse into what we liked and what we did. So far I have implemented KAHOOTs and REMIND with my students. Something I would like to look into is how to get the add-on through GOOGLE FORMS to eliminate some answer choices. I would also like some more information on using google classroom.

	Diana	Danielle
Session 1  UP your game : Google classroom  https://goo.gl/rjfNmy	(plum paper designs  customize planner)  AddOnsfor Docs  ·                     streamline workflowcanpushoutwebsites to kids at once  ·                     readability removes distractions  ·                     easy bib   ·                     tag cloud generator  AddOnsfor FORMs  ·                     Choice eliminator  ·                     g(math)  ·                     form notifications  AddOnsfor sheets  ·                     flubaroo: score instantly  ·                     super quiz  ·                     autocraft  Doctopus  Goobriclinks rubric right to students work  larid002@students.hartfordschools.org	answer garden-woordletype thing!  tweet to author!   Set up teacher twitter!  How do we set up google classroom?   Create extensions  cite this  classroom- use onchromebooks  speech recognition- super easy/add onforKAVON!   Talked with Paul aboutgmailsfor educators
Keynote:AngelaMaiers  @Angelamaiers	chalk.com   planboard.com   The words we use define the experience.   Literacy: reading writing speaking listening, math. comprehension.   letters are not just letters anymore at 18months they can associate them with brands/labels emotions  abcdefg http:  emojiliteracysupported by dominos  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPtTQ_Tp2W0   quora	"We do not have a technology gap, we have a literacy gap."  All about access!   Human Right   I love this one!!!    The greatest privilege of the web is the reverse the power structure.   Teach students how to respond and think. Teach about creating a movement. Teach aboutsharing passions.   Giving kids keys to the "cars" without educating   The room is the guru   #choose2matter
Session 2  passamaquoddy  Using Technology To Enhance Classroom Discussion (Joshua Elliott)   http://www.techinpedagogy.com	Polleverywherehttps://www.polleverywhere.com/   ·                     wordwallfeature   ·                     clickable image options  ·                     doesn’t have to be 1-1   ·                     Can be formative  ·                     very user friendly  Kahoothttps://getkahoot.com/   ·                     similarsocrativebut easier  ·                     not as friendly for open ended  ·                     can use pics  ·                     race/game show like   ·                     easy to set up  socrative:http://www.socrative.com/   ·                     good exit tickets  ·                     can get confused with stud/teacher app  twitterhttps://twitter.com   ·                     create a hashtag for your class  ·                     do real twitter not fake   ·                     less control  ·                     role play  remindhttps://www.remind.com/   ·                     makes it optional  ·                     sends out reminders  ·                     good for parents also  todaysmeethttps://todaysmeet.com/  ·                     good for sidebars  ·                     takes a little longer to set up  ·                     cant do it spur of the moment	Work on engaging students  How should we engage students- do we use phones?   Four corners- to engage all students, better than a debate- thenallosstudents to respond using- open ended  Polleverywhere:Allow for sharing ideas between students without talking   Thoughts aboutBloomzas a remind app   How do we help our students become digital natives?
Session 3  going paperless  Gilbert School   7-12Winstead	ibooks  are google apps the same as google classroom?  app: where are my students  virtual passes, QR codes	iTunes U, Library of Congress,ePubMaker,iPublish   Make PDFs into books   easy test maker   iannotate  and google classroom
Session 4  1-1 Chromebooks	https://sites.google.com/a/milforded.org/the-1-1-chromebook-classroom/