Blended Bulletin, Issue 15

Blended Brags

On Wednesday, December 16, Education Elements hosted a Launch Academy at the Mark Twain House for a group of teachers and administrators from BHS and JMA, as well as Central Office team members. Throughout the busy day, attendees had the opportunity to develop and refine key plans for the implementation of blended learning. The day started with a little warm up with our favorite yoga instructor, Maximo, at GoNoodle.

After this little bit of silliness, the group continued to work on their Design Workbooks with peer sharing through a gallery walk.

To close out the morning, attendees were able to pick 2 of four sessions to work through: Developing Self-Direct Learners; Teacher Role in the Student-Centered Classroom; Formative Assessment; and, Conferencing, Student Reflection and Feedback. These sessions were all taught through different modalities, and at the end, everyone was asked to state one intention to act on based on their new learning. 

In the afternoon, the group had much-needed work time on a few specific tasks: creating a walk-through tool for blended learning, developing a PD plan for blended learning, and revising design workbooks. Finally, the day ended with a Demo Slam for attendees to share their new learning from the day. This also gave Danielle Knobloch to show off her new selfie stick that she won earlier in the day!

If you are interested in seeing more details from the Launch Academy, please check out the agenda from the day and our very own website that we are building in collaboration with Education Elements. On the website, click "Launch" to view resources from that day!

Cool Tools

CommonLit is a free resource that provides high-quality material for teachers and students. The website hosts a collection of texts tied to certain themes and essential questions. For each theme, there is a range of texts for each grade level and genre. Each text also has embedded footnoting for vocabulary support, text-dependent comprehension questions, and discussion questions. It is not a curriculum, but rather materials that can be used in many different contexts.

Chronas is a tool that will help you and your students answer "How did the world look when...?" While it is still in beta testing, this website seems to have amazing potential. At key events in history, starting with the fatal ambush of Roman Legions in 9 AD, you can view a map of the world highlighting certain regions and cultures. By interacting with the map, you can open up Wikipedia articles tied to place you click at the time of the map. If I didn't have to write this blog, I might still be playing with this site. If you want your mind to be totally blown, check out this video.

If you were excited by Gina Rodriguez's video on Kaizena, you might also consider checking out SnagIt. Either as a desktop tool or Chrome extension, SnagIt allows the teacher to offer feedback on student work through audio or screen-capture recordings. Check out this more detailed tutorial from Alice Keeler.

Professional Learning

Future Ready update adds new resources and PD for leaders discusses the exciting updates to the federal Future Ready initiative that now seeks to develop superintendents, principals, and teachers in digital learning through personalized modules.

21 education technology recommendations for 2016 highlights the new National Education Technology Plan and its focus on ensuring that learning happens anywhere and all the time.

What Does the NCLB Rewrite Mean for Personalized Learning? shares thoughts about how the new federal education bill can potentially help or hinder student-centered learning.

5 Issues Every ‘Future Ready’ School Leader Must Address discusses the critical issues innovative schools must think about to ensure success. Embedded in the article are useful resources for each issue.

Students at the Center is Nick Donahue's TED Talk about why our work, and the work of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation is so important.

Blended Bulletin, Issue 14

Last week, I had the opportunity to meet with many teachers to work on blended learning designs using Education Elements' "core four" as a framework. Starting with Hartford's vision of placing students at the center of their learning, teachers developed problem statements to finish the thought, "I need a way to..."
To solve the problem, they then considered tactics in the areas of Small Group Instruction, Data Driven Decisions, Integrated Digital Content, and Student Reflection. I enjoyed many fruitful conversations and appreciated the teachers' willingness to be innovative practitioners.

In reflecting on these meetings, I was struck by the thought of how important it is to continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in our teaching and in our students' learning. Often, this idea is captured as "growth mindset," and while I think that is an important theory, I would like to offer a more practical approach. In brainstorming new teaching and learning designs, it would have been easy for the teachers to stick to the phrasing, "I wish that..." However, in our discussions, we mostly spoke through "What if..." and "How can I..." If you stick with wishes, no matter how positively intentioned they are, you run the danger of waiting for a new reality. Implicit in "I wish that..." is the idea that you do not have the agency or capacity to achieve the wish. In "What Ifs" and "How can I's," there is a promise that you will act to make your idea a reality. As we continue to innovate in our teaching, I would encourage this community to keep asking "What if..?" and then, "How can I...?" to make student-centered learning the reality in Hartford.

Cool Tools

For yet another way to produce instructional, Khan Academy-style videos, try using Office Mix. This is an add-on that will appear right in the menu when you open PowerPoint. Because it is built into PowerPoint, Office Mix has the added benefit of familiarity; therefore, it is quick and easy to use. It also has some built-in editing features, though not to the same extent as some other tools. Here is an article that explains how to use it. The new way to create flipped video in 60 seconds without adding software.

Professional Learning

Can a Truly Student-Centered Education Be Available to All? discusses the reality of public demand and skepticism of student-centered learning.

5 Ways to Build a Student Agency in the Digital Age shares ways to ensure students are building a sense of self in school, rather than losing it.

Blended Bulletin, Issue 13

Cool Tools

If you do one thing today, you need to check out the NEW Smithsonian Learning Lab. As a fair warning, it may be the only thing you do today, because it will be easy to get lost in all of the open educational resources (OER) on this site. The Smithsonian Institute has put together a comprehensive educational website that allows students and educators to discover materials from any of their museums/zoos, create collections of the materials, and share with peers and classes. While they have not created quizzes or anything like that about the materials, they have made a clean and simple website that puts the Smithsonian's vast collection at your finger tips. In a quick search, I came across a photo of the Seinfeld "Puffy Shirt" from the National Museum of American History, a video about astrophotographers from Smithsonian Education, and a video of the National Zoo's adorable Sloth Bear cub playing harmonica. Have fun with this one, I know I will!

If you are worried about the degradation of the English language caused by texting, then you and your students need to check out Words U. Available in the App Store for iOS, this free app integrates into the phone's messaging system, much like integrating emojis. When turned on, a user will type a text as normal, but upon clicking send, the app will replace certain words with SAT-level with vocabulary while maintaining sentence structure and even idiomatic expressions. The vocab. word will be highlighted in blue and the user can click on the word to get the definition. Sounds like a great way to learn vocabulary in a very frequently used context. Check out a demo video here.

Interested in creating instructional videos in your class? Read these reviews of three tools: Screencastify, Screencast-O-Matic, and Quicktime (for Mac only).

Professional Learning

Courtney Belolan, an instructional coach at a Nellie Mae school in Maine, shares tips on the intricacies of student-centered learning in Learners in the Center, Not Learners on Their Own.

In Reflections on Student-Centered Learning Part 1- Student Perspective, Sarah Hatton from Students at the Center Hub shares her lessons learned from the student panels at the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) Symposium. These panels were by far the most popular sessions at the symposium (I should know as I couldn't get in the door!).

My former assistant principal in high school, and current superintendent of Meriden Public Schools, Mark Benigni, makes the case for bringing back the fun in learning through student-centered and blended learning in Putting the Fun Back in Education: Incorporating Enrichment Into Your Daily Instruction.

Read about how the Every Student Succeeds Act, the bill replacing No Child Left Behind, seeks to define important language for digital learning in Revisions to No Child Left Behind Attempt to Define Education Technology.

Here is what looks to be a great, free webinar. Even if you can't view it at the scheduled time, you will get a recording sent to you later! Questioning for Classroom Discussion: Developing Students As Thinkers and Learners.

CHROMEBOOKS APPS

Chromebook apps

CECA took place at Mohegan Sun Casino, this conference showed me how many tools we have to work with our students. Here  I have some notes about  excellent apps to implement our Chromebooks. I am really sure students will be engaged with all this new material. You only need your google account  to sign in here.

Padlet-is a virtual wall that allows people to express their thoughts on a common topic easily. It works like an online sheet of paper where people can put any content (e.g. images, videos, documents, text) anywhere on the page, together with anyone, from any device.https://padlet.com/

Wideo-Engage your students with animated lesson or inspire them with new projects.

http://wideo.co/en/

Kaizena- is the best place to help students improve their work on Google Drive. Voice feedback for writing is nothing new. Stanford experimented with recording verbal feedback for students on cassette tapes back in the '80s, and there's been a steady stream of research ever since Aug 2014

https://kaizena.com

Lucidchart-is a web-based diagramming software which allows users to collaborate and work together in real time to create flowcharts, organisational charts, website wireframes, UML designs, mind maps, software prototypes, and many other diagram types.

https://www.lucidchart.com/

Socrative-is a cloud-based student response system developed in 2010 by Boston-based graduate school students. It allows teachers to create simple quizzes that students can take quickly on laptops – or, more often, via classroom tablet computers or their own smartphones.

http://www.socrative.com/

Piktochart-is a web-based infographic software which allows users without intensive experience as graphic designers to create professional-grade infographics, using templates.

http://piktochart.com/

2015 Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference

Three takeaways from the 2015 Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference:
1.Received a basic review of the blended learning models
2. Lots of new information that I can use with all of my classes on the application of Google Education apps and add-ons  such as, Goobric used with Doctopus, and Google Forms and Sheets with the add-on of Flubaroo and using Google Drawing.
3. Socrative.com for a last minute exit slip and quick way to ask students questions and get responses and data back from students.
4.Let them ask questions session is about QFT and how this method gets students to develop their own questions for a more student directed lesson.  Also how to use these questions for assessments and to track students engagement in the topic.