Blended Bulletin, Summer Edition 1

Blended Brags

Bulkeley and JMA both presented at the district's community update on the High School Centers of Innovation. JMA students presented projects that they created during Content Day, a weekly flex day in the schedule where they create media with the guidance of experts. Bulkeley's presentation featured an overview of the changes that shifted teaching and learning during the past school year and blended learning testimonials from students. It was great to have the opportunity to share our important work with families, community members, teachers, and district leaders!

Cool Tools

Check out the Digital Public Library of America for tremendous primary source resources.

By now, many of you have probably seen this emotional speech from a high school valedictorian in Texas revealing her status as an undocumented immigrant. Well, she is just one of many undocumented immigrant students who wish to go to college but face struggles in achieving that reality. For these students, DREAMer's Roadmap is an app that connects them to a database of scholarships that undocumented immigrants can apply for. Check out the story of how this app came to be here.

Padlet, everyone's favorite "corkboard" site, recently released updates that made some significant improvements. Most importantly, it is now easier to customize and share your padlets, and you will no longer have to answer the most common question, "How do I type on this?" Padlet has introduced a pencil icon, in addition to the standard double click feature, to allow users to post on boards.

Professional Learning

How can we change schools to better reflect modern business and industry conditions? What does education reimagined look like? asks us to refocus on teaching the desired skills, knowledge, and dispositions of today's workplace.

Unpacking whether blended learning works urges researchers to ask the right questions of blended learning; not whether or not blended learning works, but, what works, for which students, in which circumstances?

When thinking about your classes for next school year, consider adjusting how you plan and use the ideas in Design Thinking and PBL.

Something else to think about this summer is connecting with other educators on Twitter. Get inspired by reading Before We Were Connected: How To Achieve a Statewide Professional Learning Network.

Though the meaning of "growth mindset" tends to get stretched, Does Your Curriculum Have a Growth Mindset? offers some important questions to ask when assessing the effectiveness of what you're teaching.

How Deeper Learning Helps Children Succeed discusses the importance of deeper learning methods, especially PBL. Worryingly, the excerpt also points to evidence that low-income and minority students are not given the same opportunities for deeper learning as peers in more well-off districts.

Learn about systemic inclusion of student voice in Vt. High School Takes Student Voice to Heart.

Blended Bulletin, Issue 31

Blended Brags

In lieu of the usual shout-outs and kudos, I'd like to invite you back to the blog again tomorrow to check out our year in review!

Cool Tools

Google's Global Forest Change Explorer is an impressive aggregation of data culled from Google Earth and researchers about deforestation across the planet. The maps and layered images will for certain lead students to ask big questions!

If students have an Android phone, they can download Google's new Science Journal app and start gathering data from the world around them. Students can track anything from the volume of a dog's bark to how much light enters a tinted car window and keep records right on their phone. Since Google also recently announced that Android apps will be available on Chromebooks, there may soon come a time when our students' Chromebooks can be used for sophisticated data measurement!

EasyBib is offering free access to EasyBib EDU for teachers and their classes for next school year. This EDU account allows some class management features for teachers that you wouldn't have with using the standard version of EasyBib. Students can also have notebooks of their citations for different projects they may be working on, and an annotation tool seems to be in the works! If you are interested, sign up for access by filling out this Google Form here by August 1, 2016.

If you're a Planboard user (or, even if you're not...), Chalk.com has recently improved Markboard. The interface is a thing of beauty and the tool seems to have potential in making several types of student assessment/feedback more effective and efficient.


Professional Learning

Whether a 1:1 classroom will be new for you next year, or you've had some experience in a 1:1 room, check out the tips in 10 steps to a better one-to-one experience as you think of planning for next year.

In Professional development should make teachers feel urgent, not small and isolated a National Board Certified Teacher makes the case for increasing the professionalism of teaching through sharing best practices via web resources and video.

Check out High School of the Future for an in-depth look at Salt Lake City's Innovations Early College High School, where learning is hyper-personalized for every student.

Another important step in having students own their learning may be to have students lead parent-teacher conferences. Find out why and how in How to Shift to a Student-Centered Approach in Parent-Teacher Conferences.

As we think about continue to grow as student-centered teachers next year, you may find inspiration in the article Why Good Professional Development Is Crucially Linked to an Educator’s Attitude