Blended Bulletin, Summer Edition 2

Cool Tools

Stupeflix is a free drag-and-drop, online video editor. If you're familiar with Animoto, Stupeflix uses the same type of editing "magic" based on themes of your choice. What Stupeflix has over Animoto is premium features for free! You and your students will be able to create videos up to 20 minutes in length and access the website's full range of themes and editing options.

Google announced some interesting new tools and features at last week's ISTE conference. First is Google Cast, an app that allows students to instantly share their screen with the teacher's. Read more about it here. Second, Google has now released the Expeditions virtual reality app for free! The app has been in beta since we test drove it in the fall, but now all Android users, and soon all iOS users, are able to download the app and participate in VR field trips all around the world. Finally, Google has added a quiz feature to Forms that allows for automatic grading. Many teachers have already used the Flubaroo add-on for this, but Google has added this function directly into their app. When you create a Form, click the Settings icon to see how to activate the new feature. Learn more here!

If you are interested in checking out some Maker projects to include in your classroom, explore PBS LearningMedia's Makers resources for some neat ideas!

PBS LearningMedia also has a great collection of art resources in The Art Assignment, a series of interviews with artists revealing their inspirations, methods, and techniques.

Professional Learning

Want to know if your students are truly engaged in your classroom? Check out this infographic. Thanks, Kelly and Natalie from Education Elements, for the helpful resource!

Video chatting opens up a range of possibilities for enhancing projects and lectures in the classroom. Check out Five Ways Teachers Can Use Video Chat in the Classroom for some good ideas.

One of the quickest ways to learn new classroom technology is through video tutorials. Richard Byrne, author of the popular Free Technology for Teachers blog, has a comprehensive YouTube channel teaching you how to use great tech tools.

‘Curiosity Is a Powerful Motivator’: Spotlighting Student-Centered Learning highlights the impact that SCL has on both teachers and students in addressing issues of social justice.

As seen in The Connecticut YOUTH Forum Talks Student-Centered Learning, SCL isn't just a priority in schools! See if you can spot the Bulkeley student!

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

Personalized Learning Summit 2016 Takeaways

“All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they are now getting.  If they want different results, they must change the way they do things.”   Tom Northrup

Wow.  My experience in these two short days has been profound.   Northrup’s quote included in a keynote address by Michael Horn, coupled with a visit to a well known tech company has diverted my attention from professional development around strategies and best practice to the importance of culture and space.  It is so essentially important that all stakeholders know and understand the vision and mission of the school.  How else can we expect buy-in and fidelity to our vision?  To move beyond compliance to “this is how we do things around here?” This change needs to happen.

I realize that we already have our list of words/phrases that create our foundational vocabulary, but I think we need to go further than that.  Yes, we need to know and own those words/phrases, but are they easily articulated?  And perhaps we need to revisit them given our learning over the past year.  But there needs to be more.  How do we build it into the DNA of our culture? Suggestions welcomed!

Of course, we also need to be able to identify our culture in the makeup of our space(s).  Investment in new mobile furniture is imperative to promote collaboration and ease of transition in the classroom.  If we want to model what is going on in the workforce, rows of desks facing front is NOT the answer.  If we want to grow individuals reliant on guidance and focused on a central personality, then we can continue as we are.  If we want students that are self-reliant, that own and drive their learning, then we must change the way we set up the classroom and the learning experience.

Blended Bulletin, Issue 30

Blended Brags

This kudos goes out to Danielle Knobloch who is already thinking about plans for next year! Danielle sees room for improvement in her blended classroom and plans to implement consistent structures for the beginning and end of class. She has specific plans in place to increase and improve student reflection in her classroom, asking questions about what students have learned, and also how students have learned. Awesome work!

Cool Tools

Amazon Whispercast is a freemium tool that connects teachers with a large library of eBooks (some free, some not) that can be digitally distributed to a class. Teachers can also upload their own content for easy distribution. Thanks for the suggestion, Laura Pels!

Here's an interesting take on summer reading. Newsela has unveiled Camp Newsela. Through this web tool, students can join a club (i.e., Strong-of-Stomach Club) and be assigned articles to read over a 2 week time span. When the club achieves its reading goal, students will have the chance to donate to DonorsChoose projects.


Professional Learning

Without clear communication, learning movements like project-based learning and makerspaces can be scary to parents in low-income communities. Why the Language We Use About Learning Determines Inclusivity discusses how to make deeper learning stick and be successful for all stakeholders. 

In The Personalized Learning Mindset, posits that personalized learning is not something you do or accomplish, but rather is a way of being. Check out the three proof points of someone with a PL Mindset.

Saying 'No' to the Slide: 20+ Summer Opportunities for Educators and Students offers lists of ideas for both students and teachers to continue learning over the summer. These lists have a distinct edtech flavor.

Thoughts from the Education Elements PL Summit

Education Elements, our blended learning consultants, recently hosted their 2nd annual Personalized Learning Summit in San Francisco. Amidst the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, and lots of sea lions, this conference provided an opportunity to hear about best practices in the field from presenters and to network with leaders from other schools and districts.

Here are a few takeaways:

1. Walk Your Talk- During the PL Summit, I had the opportunity to tour the headquarters of Pinterest. Though admittedly I am not the target demographic of the app, I am secretly (okay, not-so-secretly) an avid Pinner. Needless to say, the visit to Pinterest was definitely a highlight of the conference! While at first it was cool to feel like I was on the set of Silicon Valley, it quickly became apparent that this company is driven by a clear purpose and all of the organizational decisions they make are in accordance with that purpose. This is best demonstrated by Pinterest's core values: We put Pinners first, We knit, We're authentic, We go.

There is much to learn from how Pinterest practices these core values. By putting Pinners first, Pinterest has committed to perfecting the user experience. If students are our users, what are schools doing to perfect student experiences? All decisions teachers and school leaders make need to be for the good of students. The core value, We knit, refers to the collaborative workplace at Pinterest. All meeting rooms had glass walls and different teams consistently met together. To really best serve our students, teachers should be just as open and collaborative in their practice. We're authentic captures the reflective environment of colleagues in Pinterest headquarters, where high-level goals are set and actions towards those goals are honestly assessed. Teachers shouldn't be afraid to set ambitious goals and risk falling short; instead, they should be empowered to set those goals and supported if they don't quite get there. And finally, We go describes the need for Pinterest to always be ready to change and try things. Schools should feel that same sense of urgency to try best practices. There needs to be a spirit of planning and iteration, and not waiting for the next school year to try something.

2. Learning Like Our Students- This takeaway seems to be the culmination of a lot of my learning from conferences this year. As we seek to personalize learning for our students, especially in blended environments to ensure that learning can happen anytime, anywhere, shouldn't we practice the same type of learning as teachers? Teachers love learning, but traditionally, that learning is meted out in small doses at regular times over the course of the school year. When that chance for professional learning finally comes around, it often misses the mark in terms of content and delivery. These reasons are why I've been so enamored by microcredentialing for professional development. Microcredentialing is the idea that teachers should have the flexibility of place, pace, path, and/or time in their professional development. A microcredential could be awarded to a teacher that demonstrates (competency-based) their learning or expertise of a concrete teaching practice. Many districts incentivize this by awarding CEUs, college credit, or money for completion of microcredentials. While there is still a lot to explore with this, such as how can we incentivize in this district, the idea that teachers should be empowered to learn anytime, anywhere is something that sticks with me.

3. We're Not Alone!- In one particular session, and in conversations with leaders from other districts, I found it remarkable how similar personalized learning shifts have been across the country, from California, to Wyoming, to Myrtle Beach. Both the successes and struggles that we have in Hartford are similar to those in other districts in their first years of implementation. What was great to see were videos from districts a few years advanced from where we are, and the impact their changes have had. While it may seem like we have a long way to go to become a student-centered district, it is important to know that we are moving in the right direction and we have co-travelers on this journey!

Blended Bulletin, Issue 29

Blended Brags

On Sundays, I get weekly reports from our digital content providers about our students', teachers', and schools' progress. Despite some obstacles, we've had several teachers jump in to start using IXL, ThinkThroughMath, and ThinkCERCA. Bringing in digital content to the classroom is no easy thing, especially when you think about what may go wrong, so I applaud the risk-taking! I'd encourage everyone to check out the digital tools that you have access to and to start thinking about how you might use them next year.

Cool Tools

Newsela has done a lot this school year to update their tool with new content and new capabilities. Most recently, Newsela announced the release of Time Machine, an archive of historical accounts of significant events. These articles still feature different Lexile ranges and are tied to reading standards. Newsela also recently released text sets, some of which partner these historic articles with current events.

Professional Learning

One of the key grappling points with blended and student-centered learning is how much personalization is too much. In Bursting the 'Personalization' Bubble: An Alternative Vision for Our Public Schools, the author advocates for a renewed use of cognitive science in designing new instructional practices.

In What a Decade of Education Research Tells Us About Technology in the Hands of Underserved Students, the author reports on her review of literature that basically concludes, "overall, students who are black, Hispanic, or low-income are more likely to use computers for drill-and-practice, whereas students who are white or high-income are more likely to use computers for simulations or authentic applications." The author goes on to suggest five uses of technology to help fix this inequity.