Blended Bulletin, Issue 18

Cool Tools

PBS LearningMedia: Nature is a collection of science videos and lesson plans that have been developed based on PBS's documentary series Nature. The collection has very high-quality materials that can be adapted for myriad uses.

Dotstorming is a real-time brainstorming web app that lets groups collaborate on a digital board, similar to Padlet. In this app, participants will place their "dot" on the idea or ideas they want to vote for. The owner of the board has the ability to customize with the ideas that participants will vote on.

Professional Learning

How Data Works to Support DIY Learning shares the importance of exposing our students to digital learning tools to inspire them to be lifelong learners.

Flipping the classroom when home access is a problem proposes solutions to some of the common problems that may be holding you back from trying to flip your classroom.

If you, like me, have ever thought that some of the stories of project-based learning and student-ownership are too good to be true, 6 ways to support kids who don’t take ownership of their learning looks at the realities of transitioning students to take more ownership and offers plausible solutions to some of the big problems.

FETC: Riding the Wave of Innovation

As I walked into the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando last week for the Future of Education Technology Conference (FETC), I was confused when I saw a giant "Surf Expo" sign and first thought I was in the wrong place.

When I realized that I was indeed in the right place, my second and third thoughts were, "I'd like to see THAT vendor floor," and, "I bet they have cool SWAG." I also thought that the combination of conferences in this one building presented an unusual confluence of people and ideas.

But with my limited surfing knowledge, and abundant time eating alone after sessions wrapped up each day, I started to see parallels between education technology and surfing.

1. Educational technology, like surfing, is a balancing act. The first session I attended was TechShare Live, where four EdTech leaders each presented new and exciting pieces of technology in a rapid-fire round-robin. This included technology like smart refrigerators, programmable drones, microphone dodgeballs, and holograms projected from a phone. I also sat in very interesting presentations on both augmented and virtual reality. As we all know, there is A LOT of technology out there, and all of it is exciting and cool. But the thing to remember is that exciting and cool need to be in balance with curriculum and pedagogy. Technology allows teachers to engage kids in all sorts of fun ways, but as a teacher, it is important that you make sure you are using the technology to enhance the teaching and learning that is happening in your classroom. One presenter, Steven Anderson, emphasized that we are past the point where we can just check off a "technology use" box. We need to be cognizant of how the technology is being used and if it is a value-add or not.

2. Innovation comes in waves. After the last conference I attended in November, I walked away thinking, "Well, that was fun, but I don't know if I learned anything new." With that thought hanging over me at the beginning of FETC, I picked out sessions on topics that I hoped would present new ideas. To stick with my surfing analogy, a few sessions really took me for a ride. I was excited by a session on augmented reality and the impact it can have on engagement and deeper learning. I also walked away from a session on Classcraft with a refreshed view on gamification. In my thinking on educational technology, I've found there are often periods of time where each tool you find excites you, but also periods of time where you are waiting to find something new, much like a surfer waiting for the next wave. During the lulls, I encourage you to revisit technologies you've found in the past.

3. Both educational innovation and surfing are full of risk. Surfing, like any extreme sport where gravity is the referee, is risky and dangerous. If you make a wrong move, there can be harmful consequences. What we are doing in our move to blended learning is risky. We are looking to take a way of teaching and learning that is functional and comfortable and change it, without really fully knowing what is on the other side. But I would add that this is no different from the risks we ask our students to take every day. The closing keynote speaker and 2014 National Teacher of the Year Sean McComb used an image of white-water rafting to demonstrate this point. 

 McComb urges all of us to "be in the boat" with our students by taking risks alongside them. 

So, with that said, here are some more practical ideas to help you ride the wave!

• Classcraft to gamify your classroom and improve motivation.
• Aurasma as an augmented reality app to improve engagement and bring static images to life.
• Here's a video demonstration
• Google Tone is a Chrome extension that lets you share links with any device that also has the extension via a musical tone. Think musical QR code.
• Kahoot! is a great class response tool that has been around for a bit. I recently learned about "Ghost Mode" that lets students play against past responses to the same quiz. They can even compete against their past self!
• Kiddle is a safe search engine powered by Google that includes large images with search results. This can be very useful in helping our ELLs do research. 
• Skype has a speech to speech translator built in!

Blended Bulletin, Issue 17

Cool Tools

PenPal Schools is an interesting free tool that connects students' voices from across the globe. Given an interesting topic in one of three curricular areas, students comment about articles in order to share different perspectives. I can certainly see this as a powerful platform in social studies and foreign language classrooms.


Professional Learning

From Mrs. Greene, George Couros' Purpose and Empowerment succinctly makes the case for increasing student ownership. George Couros writes a very interesting blog and is a great follow on Twitter!

Four Steps to Transforming a School discusses how data-informed instruction, student-centered approaches, innovation, and caring adults are vital to improving outcomes for our students.

Newton’s New Law of Teaching: When Quality Instruction and Technology Intersect posits that master teachers possess high innovation skills/mindset and high instructional skills in their content. The article also offers professional development suggestions for teachers that fall in different quadrants on this interesting matrix:

#InclusiveSpaces: Classroom Design for Every Learner introduces the idea of crowdsourcing ideas for overcoming the inherent obstacles of redesigning classroom spaces. Follow the #InclusiveSpaces for updates in the coming months.

Predictions, Dumb and Otherwise, about Technology in Schools in 2025 offers a picture of the future of education. Larry Cuban, the author, suggests that the focal point of the picture should not be new technologies, but new ideas about what to teach and learn.

How paper-free days can spark a tech transformation describes how one school moved away from paper not to save money, but to inspire innovative and creative ways to engage students.

CMTC!

The Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference was informative, useful and inspiring. I was thrilled to be attending the sessions where I was able to take away such valuable, ready to use, and encouraging ideas. My biggest takeaways were about the Google extensions and Google classroom.  

Take away 1:  Google Classroom- lots of awesome opportunities that have already been discussed on this blog, but as a little refresher here are some cool perks. “Share to Classroom” option will put the same screen on all of the student’s computer that are in your “class.” This will help focus the class and will deter any confusion of how to get to a certain website. I am excited to use Google classroom because it works seamlessly with all of Google’s products that we already like such as Google forms and email. I am eager to learn more about Google classroom and how it can work in my classroom, but this conference gave me great confidence that this can be a great virtual “home base” for my students. There is a lot more with Google Classroom, but my biggest take away is that it is the format that I want to use GC to begin my Blended Learning adventure!

Take away 2: Cool research tool! goo.gl/fcuvGC is a document that explains step by step how to easily create a work cited page. I had no idea this was a tool that Google docs had and as long as the source is reliable, I think this can be a great tool for students to use. Chelsea and I were pretty wowed by this easy to use feature.

Take away 3: Google Chrome Extensions are super cool. If we are able to have access to them this document: http://ow.ly/Vn9Oz is an exceptional resource. My favorite extension is Read and Write. This extension is free for teachers but has a fee after 30 days for students. This extension encompasses great tools from a variety of extensions all in one. I feel like this extension can be extremely helpful for our ELL students to be able to participate completing the same assignments as our native English speaking students. Reading levels can be altered, dictionaries, picture dictionaries, were my favorite but there is so much you can do with it! On the list there are many separate extensions that do most of these features, it’s just simple and convenient to have it all on one extension. 

At the beginning of December Kaitlin Sullivan and I attended the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference in New Hampshire (Casey and Maria were there as well). This 3 day conference was a whirl wind of information and ideas, it was a truly inspiring experience.

I could go on for pages about my take-aways, but, I'll try to keep it brief :)

My first take-away is.....how awesome Google Classroom is!! Even though we do not have computers yet, I can't tell you how often I think about how much better my lesson could be designed if I could do it through Google Classroom. It's such a great way to streamline information sharing as well as collecting work, monitoring work, and giving quick feedback to students. I suggest finding videos on YouTube to teach yourself all the ins and outs of Google Classroom, it's excellent.

In addition, Google Apps that can be used to help students through work you may have disseminated through Google Classroom has so many features that I never knew about before! We discussed a lot at the conference about how these tools can be so helpful for ELL students. However, they are awesome for differentiation purposes for enrichment and support of all students. Below I am including a few links that you can use to familiarize yourself with these awesome tools:

https://sites.google.com/a/amtechnology.org/treasure-trove/treasure-trove-s-greatest-hits

goo.gl/fcuvGC

http://ow.ly/Vn9Oz 

My second take-away is...how important it is to become a lifelong learner and instill this in our students as well. Technology is not just a buzz-word, it is here to stay and it is the ultimate key to being a lifelong learner! We need to inspire our students to want to utilize the technology because they are curious and want to learn. The Keynote speaker one day, Travis, founder of iSchool Initiative, said “customers drive the industry” if the customer wants something the industry responds, if the customer is comfortable without the industry will not change. He said that we need to think of our students as our customers within the education industry and that our customers are too comfortable with complying with the status quo. Things that need to happen are problem solving, critical thinking, and changing the student-teacher dynamic. These things are hard and our customers don’t want it. We need to empower students in a way that drives them to want these changes. We need to empower students to show that they can have a voice in education, they just need to set their minds to it and work for it. He gave a good example about meeting Peter, the creator of Angry Birds. Peter was viewed as an overnight success, making millions off the game in a short period of time. Travis spoke to him and asked him how it felt, finding out that, Angry Birds had been the 58th game his company produced. That means that Peter and his company failed 57 times before succeeding, this is something we need to instill in our students. Travis gave a great example of places where empowering students worked well. He said that he helped design a program where administration presents problems to students, then students come up with real life solutions. Some of the outcomes were really inspiring. So, perhaps we could apply that to Bulkeley to show students that their voices matter and they can make a impact. This type of involvement can motivate them in their education. Travis saw implementing technology into the classroom as part of fostering life long learning in our information age. We need to foster the right attitude of hunger, resilience, and 

find a way to inspire students (and staff) through the “why”. We need to teach the skills of finding, filtering, and applying. Finally, provide the tools of the mobile devices, tech. infrastructure and connecting our students. 

My third take-away is…the power of collaboration! Amongst staff as well as amongst students and staff/student collaboration. One particular session had a focus on making sure that our lessons include teaching students “hard skills” (those included in the course work) but also “soft skills” (collaboration, time management, critical thinking and problem solving). The presenters argued that cross-discipline collaboration could provide this by making students apply their hard skills in a new environment or innovative way which helps them develop the soft skills. I would love to create an environment where teachers are working together, across disciplines to create projects and assignments. It seems that students too often feel their learning for a class is confined to that specific class but that is not how it works in real life. In real life you’re using your knowledge in all sorts of new contexts, every day. Forcing students to think this way will help them be critical thinkers. 

This idea of collaboration is also SO important when implementing blended learning models. Especially with staff who are more uncomfortable transforming their traditional practices. Teachers need to collaborate to support and assist each other in development. This came up in one session about the challenges to the mobile classroom, teachers who are difficult to get on board with technology. A suggestion that was developed was having teachers who are comfortable with technology co-teach with the other teachers to support them in their implementation until they feel ready.  We are in a day of age where information is readily available and shareable. We should encourage each other by taking advantage of this and always providing what we can, like we do here!

If you want way too much information (some of which may be helpful to you) check out our notes from the conference….

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/18ddako-sZusOOZVZ9YgHKkXSUYP9eS2xMwJzahQkwRY/edit?usp=sharing

Blended Bulletin, Issue 16

Cool Tools

This week, I've suggested two YouTube channels that work as great teaching tools. While acknowledging the issues we have with YouTube access, there are many fantastic YouTube channels to which you can subscribe. Rather than searching for and curating individual videos, channels provide some consistency in instruction and are usually regularly updated. You and your students will be engaged by some of the YouTube "celebrities" featured on channels, like the ones suggested below.

Veritasium is a YouTube channel featuring scientific experiments and demonstrations. What I like about this channel is that the creator relies on the knowledge of the masses for hypotheses and explanations of his experiments. He updates weekly and encourages interaction through live links embedded in his videos, discussion in the comments section, and asking viewers to send in their own videos to him. Here's a sample:

CrashCourse is a wildly popular YouTube channel created by John and Hank Greene. John Greene is the author of well-known young adult novels like The Fault in Our Stars and Papertowns and Hank is his YouTube celebrity brother. The two together form and entertaining and intellectually challenging duo who celebrate being nerdy about all sorts of subjects. CrashCourse features videos that explain complex topics in different subject areas through the use of humor, pop culture references, and talking really fast. Here's a sample:

Professional Learning

Deeper Teaching is a white paper uses the example of two Algebra teachers teaching the same concept in different ways to make the case for student-centered approaches.

May the Forecast Be With You attempts to draw parallels between the future of education and the long time ago galaxy of Star Wars.

For some local flavor, watch the video Hartford Boundless to learn about a new partnership between Hartford Public Schools and the Hartford Public Library to help make learning happen anytime, anywhere.