Group items tagged

"School and district leaders that are thinking about personalizing education tell us one of their top concerns is how to train, support, and develop teachers effectively to teach in ways that may feel new and unfamiliar.  As former educators we agree that this is crucial, and are happy that they recognize the challenge and are ready to take it on. First and foremost, in order to support the teachers we are asking to teach in blended learning environments we have to understand the implications on teaching practice.  Over the past three years, we've worked with thousands of teachers tackling the question of how to personalize learning in their classrooms and we've gathered a set skills into 5 domains of blended learning teaching that we believe are new skills to master for veteran and novice teachers alike. This five-domain rubric was created, not for evaluation purposes (there are enough evaluation rubrics out there!), but for teachers to be able to self-assess, set goals and progress.  In the same way, we want blended learning to allow for students to have a better understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses, we want teachers to be able to identify blended specific skills and better understand their own strengths and areas for growth.  We wanted to give teachers, their coaches, and their leaders, a sense of what to strive for, and help them plot a path to get there through aligned professional development.  We also found that the teachers we work with cherish the opportunity to self-reflect, identify the skills they have and the skills they need, and take the time to set goals around where they want to shift their practice.  Many of our schools infuse these concepts into community of practices discussions for continuous learning."

"I often wonder if what we see as teaching at professional learning events would be acceptable in a high school classroom. If the purpose of professional development (Pro-D) is professional learning, then what is our evidence that learning does, in fact, occur? Are we using effective teaching practices in Pro-D? Although Pro-D is evolving, the "Sit'n'Git" way of learning seems to still be alive and well in many conferences and workshops throughout Canada and the U.S. In the past five years, I cannot tell you how many times I've sat in a large conference room for a number of hours with hundreds of other dedicated educators and not been provided with the opportunity to even talk to the person beside me. People are spending hundreds and thousands of dollars to attend these events to listen to a series of lengthy lectures without the opportunity to network and wrestle with the presented ideas. I'm not opposed to a keynote address to start off the day with some inspiring, thought-provoking ideas; however, if there is no opportunity to take these ideas and move deeper, many of the thoughts that are initiated in the keynote get lost as I move on to the next session or listen to the next presenter. It's no secret that in order for deeper learning to occur, we must DO something with a new concept; we must apply new learning to take it from an idea to implementation. Our current typical model of Pro-D makes deeper learning a challenge and often only leaves participants with a few ideas that are unfortunately left on the shelf with the many glossy white binders from workshops of years past. At some point we need to stand up and say that a high volume of "Sit'n'Git" style of Pro-D is no longer acceptable and is an insult to those who have spent money, time, and effort to attend. While doing this, we also need to rethink the conference model and professional learning so that it better aligns with what we want to see in classrooms."

"There's a common misconception that the best way to encourage children's creativity is simply to get out of the way and let them be creative. Although it's certainly true that children are naturally curious and inquisitive, they need support to develop their creative capacities and reach their full creative potential. Supporting children's development is always a balancing act: how much structure, how much freedom; when to step in, when to step back; when to show, when to tell, when to ask, when to listen. In putting together this section, I decided to combine tips for parents and teachers, because I think the core issues for cultivating creativity are the same, whether you're in the home or in the classroom. The key challenge is not how to "teach creativity" to children, but rather how to create a fertile environment in which their creativity will take root, grow, and flourish."

"For today's tweens and teens, technology is part of the fabric of everyday life. They're watching TV on lots of devices and using smartphones and tablets to maximum advantage -- texting, researching, sharing, connecting -- sometimes using multiple devices at once. Educators need to understand how technology fits in children's lives to know how it can be used to support learning. But we can't begin to make sense of what these technological changes mean for kids until we understand what's being used and for how long and how kids feel about technology and media. That's why we're pleased to release a new report, the Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Tweens, which paints a more complete picture of how tweens and teens are using media. Some findings may not be surprising: Kids like to multitask while doing homework. Other findings point to continued challenges around digital equity: Lower-income teens have less access to home computers and are less likely to use them for homework. Here are more findings:"

"My objective with this wide-ranging set of skills, and involving the community so closely in their development, is to give kids the chance to practice whatever makes them passionate now and feel encouraged -- even if they're obsessed with making stuff exclusively with duct tape. It's crucial that kids learn how to be passionate for the rest of their lives. To start, they must first learn what it feels like to be simultaneously challenged and confident. It's my instinct that we should not try to introduce these experiences through skills we value as much as look for opportunities to develop them, as well as creativity and literacy, in the skills they already love. MAGICIANS CRAFT ILLUSIONS THAT BAFFLE THE SENSES AND CONFUSE OUR REASONING. THEY PLAN LIKE SCIENTISTS, BUT PERFORM AS ARTISTS. ONLY THROUGH LONG AND DISCIPLINED PREPARATION DO THEY SUCCEED. It's difficult to predict which skills will be valuable in the future, and even more challenging to see the connection between our children's interests and these skills. Nothing illustrates this better than Minecraft, a popular game that might be best described as virtual LEGOs. Calling it a game belies the transformation it has sparked: An entire generation is learning how to create 3D models using a computer. Now, I wonder, what sort of businesses, communication, entertainment or art will be possible? Cathy Davidson, a scholar of learning technology, concluded that 65% of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven't even been invented yet. I bet today's kids will eventually explore outcomes and create jobs only made possible by the influence of Minecraft in their lives. Why take any chances and build your dream house with blueprints alone? The Minecraft kid could easily make a realistic 3D model of one for you to walk through before you build. That's why DIY treats Minecraft as a tool, not a game, and encourages our members to use it to pursue art, architect

"How many schools and how many classrooms allow student choice? And, in adult-centered spaces, how often do young people have the opportunity to make important decisions? Our mainstream educational machine is fueled by the idea that adults know best-that adults must impart their knowledge to prepare students for a demanding world. Our responsibility as teachers is to teach students for their own good…a "good" that more and more of us are having difficulty understanding. We teach students addition and multiplication facts because some day they will need to calculate very quickly…a tip at a restaurant or a bill at the grocery store in case their smartphone runs out of batteries. We teach them to write a five paragraph essay on the theme of a book because they will need those writing skills when…writing an argument to dispute a lawsuit. We teach them how to conjugate "to be" in Spanish because it might save their life…at a fruit stand in South America. While we are preparing them for possible situations, should these situations define the entirety of the direction of their education? I propose that we introduce some choice and some unknown into the situation of school. What if we allow students to make choices about what they learn, how they learn, and when they learn? In a way, 1:1 iPad programs are sparking choice whether we're OK with it or not."

"Makerspace is a rapidly growing trend in schools across the country, but to be honest, I've never implemented one myself, and I can't quite picture the logistics of orchestrating a Makerspace. How do kids know what to do? How can you find out what they're learning? How do you make time for that with all the other tasks crammed into the school day? And how do you keep the Makerspace from turning into a chaotic mess? I wanted to get answers to these questions from teachers who have extensive Makerspace experience, and not just at the secondary level. So, I invited Cheryl Nelson and Wendy Goldfein of Get Caught Engineering to share how they've managed Makerspaces in their own classrooms and helped other elementary and middle school teachers get started, too. Thank you, Cheryl, for sharing your experiences below! "

"The ultimate goal of teaching is to do just that - teach, not stand up in the front of the room and talk. But sometimes it's easier to talk than to teach, as we all know, especially when we need to cover a lot of material in a short amount of time. We hope students will understand, if not now then before test time, and we keep our fingers crossed that their results will indicate we've done our job. The problem is, we rely on these tests to measure understanding, and then we move on. Few of us take the time to address weaknesses and misunderstandings after the tests have been graded, and by that time it's too late for students to be interested. This means we need to rethink how we approach assessment during class. The most effective way to test student understanding is to do it while the lesson's still going on. Asking students to fill out a questionnaire and then correcting misunderstandings during the next class period won't work because students have already moved on. You've got to take advantage of the moment. If you hope to spend the majority of your time getting through to students, and not just talking, then understanding must be measured and dealt with as soon as the first frown appears on a face. "

"Anyone who has been to any of my presentations in the past couple of years knows that I'm passionate about teaching search skills. Not only search skills, but how search can and is truly changing our world. Search has the possibility to change our classrooms tomorrow because we can ask interesting questions that we never could ask before. If you are asking your students the same questions today that you asked before Google, it's time to updated your questions. Things have changed….the world has changed and questions and information are the main reason why. I consider Dan Russell from Google the father of search today. This guy understands how our world is changing because we can ask questions we never could before. In this TEDx Talk Dan talks not only about how search is changing our world but more importantly the reading strategies we need to be teaching today to our students around how to read digital information. Dan, through research of his own, goes on to show that only 51% of educators know the digital information reading strategy of "Find". That's just one strategy! There are others he talks about in this video. If nothing else this video has fueled my passion even more on why every teacher needs to know and understand this new digital world of information."

"Anxious, overconfident, curious, indifferent, angry, amused, lonely, hopeful, embarrassed, empowered, afraid, excited, diminished-teachers have seen all these emotions emerge from students as they engage with classroom content. Emotional responses to lessons often go through students' minds before they even begin to think about the material: This stuff is stupid/awesome/beyond me. I'm not comfortable with this. Finally, something I'm good at. Maybe somebody will notice I can't read. Let's see her find a mistake in that one-it's perfect. Does the teacher know I didn't study this last night? Some of us deny this reality and claim we aren't trained to guide children's emotional health. We think our purpose is to teach content and skills only, not to deal with the touchy-feely stuff. This attitude turns a blind eye to the developmental nature of the students we serve, and it runs afoul of how minds learn. Unless we're the most severe of sociopaths, we all have emotional responses that affect what we do. Adding to the messiness, our individual perspectives and experiences may put us out of sync with others' emotional states, even as the institutional nature of schools demands emotional synchronicity. The resulting miscommunication, blame, anxiety, and frustration are not the best ingredients for a good day at school. Teachers who deny the emotional elements of teaching and learning can become exhausted from ceaseless confrontations with students' emotional states, often blaming their personal stress and students' failure to learn on students' lack of motivation or maturity. They grow disconnected from students, creating an almost adversarial relationship with them: I need to get them to shape up. It's them or me. These students are hopeless; why should I bother? It's the parents who created this situation. This attitude can bleed into daily interactions with students and colleagues. It doesn't have to be this way. We can develop constructive responses to our own

"I never really learned how to cook. Other than scrambling eggs over a fire during Boy Scout camping trips, it just wasn't something I was taught growing up. Because I never learned how to make a healthy meal for myself, I ended up eating a lot more fast food than I should've-especially when I was young and early in my career. That's not the case for Robert Hand's students. Robert works at Mount Vernon High School, which is about an hour north of Seattle. He teaches family and consumer science-what we would've called "home economics" when I was in school. In other words, he helps his students learn how to take care of themselves after high school, including how to make a nutritious and delicious homemade meal. In just six years of teaching, Robert has had such a big impact on his school that he was named the 2019 Teacher of the Year for my home state of Washington. He was nice enough to visit my office earlier this year and show me how to make one of his students' favorite dishes: barbecue chicken."

"As part of our Back-to-School series, we are sharing chapters and excerpts from the Makerspace Playbook: School Edition. Today, an excerpt from Chapter 9, Startup: tips for funding your Makerspace. One idea not shared in the playbook that has come up time and again is having a Make Sale, where you sell some of the items made in the Makerspace. Hillel Posner's students make cutting boards and necklaces in their woodworking class. Casey Shea at Analy High School recoups some of the high cost of buying and maintaining the school's laser cutter with an annual yearbook-engraving fundraiser. What have you done in your school to raise money to Make? On to our excerpt: Your Makerspace may not need much of a budget to operate, if you have a space you can use for free, tools to borrow, and materials found or donated. For some Makerspaces, the ones with lots of parental involvement, many of the projects are self-funded. But if your Makerspace takes place at a school without as much family support, or if you simply do not have this all in place, you may need to research community or family foundation grants to fill in the gap. It's possible there could be city or other government agency grants available to get your Makerspace what it needs. Sometimes you can find the funding with a "planning grant." If you are partnering with a non-profit, get advice from the fundraising staff who may be able to suggest the right foundations to approach. Ask around. Online tools like Kickstarter and Indiegogo might help you conduct pointed fundraising campaigns towards a specific goal. There are many sites like this - search on "crowdfunding" for more suggestions. While it's not a Makerspace, we know that the Rhode Island Mini Maker Faire used this tactic to launch a Maker Faire. Maybe it could work for a Makerspace too."

"User Generated Education Education as it should be - passion-based. Design Thinking Process and UDL Planning Tool for STEM, STEAM, Maker Education leave a comment » Post by Jackie Gerstein, Ed.D. @jackiegerstein and Barbara Bray @bbray27. Crossed posted at http://barbarabray.net/2017/06/08/design-thinking-process-and-udl-planning-tool/. If there is a makerspace in your school, it may be down the hall, in the library, or in another building. If there is someone other than the teacher managing the makerspace or there is a schedule for the school, your kids may only be able to use it once a week or month. Some makerspace activities may be focusing on how to use the resources available and may not be connecting the activities to the curriculum or around a real world problem. If this is how the makerspace is set up in your school, then your kids may not have access to the resources, materials, and tools when they need them, especially for STEM or STEAM. In deciding what resources you need based on the learners you have, you may first need to determine how your learners learn best, what projects you plan to do, how you can set up a makerspace in your classroom, and much more. This is why we decided to create a planning tool for makerspaces in the classroom for you using the Design Thinking Process and Universal Design for Learning®."

"Teaching primary and secondary students how to program has become a hot topic lately. Even people like United States President Barack Obama to actress Angela Bassett to music artist Shakira have spoken about the value of computer programming in an initiative called Hour of Code. With good reason too. Technology is a major part of our lives. Knowing how to build new technologies means having the ability to shape its direction. So let's encourage students not just how to program, but how to write programs that can help our world. And to start, technology coordinator Holli Scharinger has curated a set of web, desktop, and mobile apps that students can use to learn computer programming."

"As I am coaching teachers in learning how to learn and teach FOR the 22nd century, I realize that the gap between being able to read traditional forms of information, communications materials in geneal and reading on new platforms, in new genres and in general new digital forms is widening drastically. Not too long ago, I wrote a post titled, Our Notion of Literacy and Iliteracy Calls for an Update.  I define literacy as the ability to read and write and being able to express and communicate our ideas to others. So, in our world, which is BOTH analog AND digital, we need to be literate in both. Especially if we are educators, in charge of teaching our students to be literate for THEIR future. The digital world is not going away, nor can it be ignored in terms of being and staying (critically) informed, lifelong learning, communicating, connecting, collaborating and contributing. One realisation for me was that new forms of reading and writing did not ONLY have to do with the skillset of learning the logistics of how to read and write on digital platforms, but had EVERYTHING to do with a new mindset that allows for new forms of reading and writing versus merely substituting the way we have done it in analog form before."

""Many board members noticed that you were on your phone a lot," he said. "If you can hold out on texting friends or checking your Twitter feed until the breaks, that would be great." Mission failed. Now I did feel like an idiot. But I was also quite angry. The thing is, I hadn't checked my Twitter feed for over two hours. I'd been taking notes. I walked down the hall and began to think. I realized that my friends and I are glued to our phones all day long. That's just the way we are. Phones are crucial to our identities and lifestyle. Telling people in my generation to put our phones away is not a solution. Just ask our teachers how that has worked for them. Even so, the workplace is not ready for how often we are going to pull out our phones. Rather than fight it, I think the other generations are going to have to learn to let go and adapt to us. The reality is that social media breaks take less than 15 seconds and can be re-energizing. That's less time than the widely accepted practice of taking breaks for coffee or snacks. That said, there is no denying that we will need to be mentored so we know when even a 15-second break is unacceptable. The good news is that teachers have been trying to coach us about this for years. We can learn and we can adapt, if the other generations adapt, too."

"For a variety of reasons (which we'll get to shortly), the iPad is the pre-dominant technology form in K-12 environments. They dominate blog headlines, promote incredible user loyalty (you could say cultish, but you said it, not me), and make adults drool like teething infants. Walk by any Apple store and through their wide glass storefront you'll see otherwise rational human beings swoon and fawn, listening intently as Apple experts explain how a slideshow works, how to use iCloud, or how to sync their iPhone with their iPad. School districts buy them, teachers buy them, and parents even send their students to school with them on occasion. So it makes sense that this kind of popularity would carry over to the classroom. Educators have officially had their curiosity piqued. They want to know how to integrate it into activities, lessons, and curriculum in general, and judging by our traffic patterns here on TeachThought, they come bearing questions."

"I have written a lot about all that being a connected educator has done for me. I have written a lot about how I would not trade it for anything and that I hope others will choose to become connected as well. I have written about how being a connected educator has enabled me to have connected students, which has radically changed the way I teach. And yet, I have not talked about the downfall of being connected much. Not like this, not in this way. Yet, I think in honor of Connected Educator month, (which is a strange month anyway because aren't we always connected?), I think it is time to discuss the downfalls. Those things that I deal with from being a connected educator, because after all, if I am going to encourage others to be connected, I think I need to be honest about all that it entails."

"If there is one piece of advice that is drilled into you as a new parent, it is to limit screen time. Bringing home our first baby, I may have not known how to effectively swaddle or change a diaper, but I did know, "back is best" and "no screen time for children under two." Yet, screens are something we as parents are constantly interacting with. In those early days of parenting, our parents laughed as we announced that we would not expose our children to screens. Yet screens are such a piece of our world. How could I expect a child not to find interest in the screens and technology that we interact with routinely? Does this abstinence approach to teaching new parents and those who work with our youngest learners do more harm than good? Does coding and computational thinking have a place in early childhood education? Yes, it certainly does. "

"Family Sharing make sharing iTunes and App Store purchases in a single household easier than ever. It also enables the new "Ask to Buy" feature, which gives kids the ability to ask for any purchase they want, and parents the ability to say yes or no, as appropriate. Family Sharing also makes it simple to set up shared calendars, shared reminders, and shared photo streams, so everyone will get to their appointments on time, remember what to buy, and enjoy magical moments as they happen. If you aren't sure where to start, we can show you not only how to set up Family Sharing but how to master all the features it offers!"