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"Please, No More Professional Development! By Peter DeWitt on April 17, 2015 8:10 AM Today's guest blog is written by Kristine Fox (Ed.D), Senior Field Specialist/Research Associate at Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations (QISA). She is a former teacher and administrator who has passion for teacher learning and student voice. Kris works directly with teachers and leaders across the country to help all learners reach their fullest potential. Peter DeWitt recently outlined why "faculty meetings are a waste of time." Furthering on his idea, most professional development opportunities don't offer optimal learning experiences and the rare teacher is sitting in her classroom thinking "I can't wait until my district's next PD day." When I inform a fellow educator that I am a PD provider, I can read her thoughts - boring, painful, waste of time, useless, irrelevant - one would think my job is equal to going to the dentist (sorry to my dentist friends). According to the Quaglia Institute and Teacher Voice and Aspirations International Center's National Teacher Voice Report only 54% percent of teachers agree "Meaningful staff development exists in my school." I can't imagine any other profession being satisfied with that number when it comes to employee learning and growth. What sense does it make for the science teacher to spend a day learning about upcoming English assessments? Or, for the veteran teacher to learn for the hundredth time how to use conceptual conflict as a hook. Why does education insist everyone attend the same type of training regardless of specialization, experience, or need? As a nod to the upcoming political campaigns and the inevitable introduction of plans with lots of points, here is my 5 Point Plan for revamping professional development. 5 Point Plan Point I - Change the Term: Semantics Matter We cannot reclaim the term Professional Development for teachers. It has a long, baggage-laden history of conformity that does not

"3 Reasons Why Faculty Meetings Are a Waste of Time By Peter DeWitt on April 10, 2015 6:50 AM Faculty Meeting.png Many school leaders walk into a faculty meeting with a single idea of how they want to move forward and walk out with the same idea. That's telling... John Hattie talks a great deal about the Politics of Distraction, which means we focus on adult issues, and not enough time...if ever...on learning. That is happening around the U.S. for sure. Recently the Assembly of NY State only furthered those distractions, which you can read about here, which means that school leaders and teachers have to work harder to maintain a focus on learning. Quite frankly, well before mandates and accountability, school leaders focused on the politics of distraction and not on learning. Compliance is not new in schools. Faculty meetings were seen as a venue to get through and something that teachers were contractually obligated to attend. During these days of endless measures of compliance, principals can do a great deal to make sure they don't model the same harmful messages to staff that politicians are sending to teachers. Jim Knight calls that "Freedom within form." In Talk Like Ted, Carmine Gallo quotes Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo) when he writes, "Creativity is often misunderstood. People often think of it in terms of artistic work - unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. If you look deeper, however, you'll find that some of the most inspiring art forms - haikus, sonatas, religious paintings- are fraught with constraints. (p. 190)" Clearly, constraints have a wide definition. There is a clear difference between the constraints of compliance and the stupidity of the legislation just passed by the assembly in NY. As we move forward, principals still are charged...or at least should be...with the job of making sure they offer part...inspiration, part...teacher voice...and a great deal of focus on learning. There is never a more important tim

"Nick Sigmon first encountered the idea of "grading for equity" when he attended a mandatory professional development training at San Leandro High School led by Joe Feldman, CEO of the Crescendo Education Group. As a fairly new high school physics teacher, Sigmon says he was open-minded to new ideas, but had thought carefully about his grading system and considered it fair already. Like many teachers, Sigmon had divided his class into different categories (tests, quizzes, classwork, homework, labs, notebook, etc.) and assigned each category a percentage. Then he broke each assignment down and assigned points. A student's final grade was points earned divided by total points possible. He thought it was simple, neat and fair."

"As I mentioned in my article, "The Research Behind 20% Time", there is a lot of support for this type of inquiry-based learning in schools. However, I want to point out a few important pieces of information in this post on why many of the folks talking about the demise of Google's 20% time and whether or not Genius Hour is enough…are simply missing the point."

"As a parent and an educator I strive to invite joy into my classroom and my home everyday. Joy is much more than happiness. Joy is a process in and of itself where we creatively learn to embrace all our emotions including disappointment and failure. Here I offer 5 entry points based upon the influential work of Marta Davidovich Ockuly (2015) and Catherine Camden-Pratt (2008), where we may foster and cultivate JOY in our own lives and the lives of those we influence."

"Carolyn Cameron, one of the most open and progressive principals I have ever known (she was also my former boss), shared the following video regarding student expectations for school. The first point was that it was important to build relationships and know students as individuals. The nine other points are things that I really believe in, but it was great hearing it from a student perspective."

"Mention robots to many English teachers and they'll immediately point down the hall to the science classroom or to the makerspace, if they have one. At many schools, if there's a robot at all, it's located in a science or math classroom or is being built by an after-school robotics club. It's not usually a fixture in English classrooms. But as teachers continue to work at finding new entry points to old material for their students, robots are proving to be a great interdisciplinary tool that builds collaboration and literacy skills. "For someone like me who teaches literature by lots of dead white guys, teaching programming adds relevance to my class," said Jessica Herring, a high school English teacher at Benton High School in Arkansas. Herring first experimented using Sphero, essentially a programmable ball, when her American literature class was studying the writing of early settlers. Herring pushed the desks back and drew a maze on the floor with tape representing the journey from Europe to the New World. Her students used class iPads and an introductory manually guided app to steer their Spheros through the maze. Herring, like many English teachers, was skeptical about how the Sphero robot could be a useful teaching tool in her classroom. She thought that type of technology would distract students from the core skills of reading, writing and analyzing literature. But she decided to try it after hearing about the success of another English teacher across the country."

"There is a lot of controversy and passion surrounding the flipped classroom. Advocates of flipping point to many advantages including students learning at their own pace, availability of online lessons and time for real work in the classroom. Opponents of flipping point to holes including student access to internet"

"Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on pinterest_shareMore Sharing Services2 Screen Shot 2013-12-11 at 12.02.54 PM Truss Me is an iPad app that students can use to design and test simple weight-bearing structures. Truss Me can be used in "challenge" mode or in "free play" mode. The challenge mode contains fifteen activities in which students are awarded points for strength and efficiency of their structures. For example, if a structure holds the weight but uses too many parts it doesn't receive as many points as a structure using fewer parts while supporting the same weight. Structures that won't work at all fall apart."

"You're spending an afternoon browsing the exhibits at an art museum. If you're anything like me, you'd probably appreciate the art a lot more if you could bring someone along that could explain the history and nuances of the pieces on display. Now imagine pointing a device at the painting and seeing it morph into a dynamic video giving you all the information you wanted about the art. Welcome to augmented reality. Virtual reality replaces the real world with an artificial, digital environment. In contrast, augmented reality alters your view of the real world by layering it with associated digital information. Augmented reality uses your device's camera to view the immediate environment and display media when it sees an object it recognizes. It has been utilized as a marketing and informational tool by many industries. Using an augmented reality app, you can point your device at an advertisement in a magazine and get detailed product demonstrations. Aim it at a sign outside a house for sale and get an after hours virtual walk-through the property. There are also many ways augmented reality can be used in education."

"The Land of Venn is an ingenious geometry game that aligns learning to fun.  It smartly avoids being "edutainment" by putting play first.  It is a universal mobile application in which you draw lines and shapes to learn about lines and shapes.  The narrative, which is silly and amusing (as is the catchy music), is a tower defense game. By performing the actions of geometry, players internalize the concepts.  It is a clear example of constructivist learning-learning by doing.  For example, children  connect points (each point is a different enemy) to draw an isosceles triangle.  As a result, confidence in abstract mathematical concepts is built as mastery of levels is met."

"Education-bashing has become something of a national sport in the United States. From hurling criticism about slipping test scores, socio-economic disparity, dropout rates, to raising concerns about poor teaching standards and school resources, the popular narrative is that U.S. schools are failing children. There's good reason for the pile-on: in many cases, the problems are real. While most of the conversation around education reform centers on how to address these existing issues, another point of view has been gaining momentum over the last several years. It's a point of view that is less focused on fine-tuning the current system for high performance-since the system was built in 1893 with the goal of churning out "good workers"-and more about rethinking education entirely and how it meets the world's rapidly changing economy in the information age. This topic is explored in depth in the feature-length documentary, Most Likely to Succeed, which premiered at Sundance and will appear at the Tribeca Film Festival April 24. In the film, director, writer and producer Greg Whiteley casts a light on the shortcomings of established education methods by focusing on one school that's defying convention, San Diego's High Tech High. While following two ninth-grade classes for a year, with classroom instruction unlike anything you've ever seen, the doc offers some inspirational ideas for how to help students rise to the occasion of an innovation economy that requires critical thinking."

"I was 11 the year my summer camp director transformed the regular schedule, procedures, and lingo that we were used to-into the most memorable, enriching experience I had ever encountered at that point in my life. I had no idea that he had 'gamified' the week; I just knew that it was the best summer ever. Instead of grouping us by numbers, we were named after the Greek alphabet. We competed daily against the other groups in volleyball, softball, kickball, and on the final night -a chariot and Olympic flame opened an epic Olympic Game contest at midnight. The director, or 'game master' as we were inclined to call him, even made everyone reset the clocks and watches-so we never knew what the real time was, the entire schedule was set on some sort of crazy alternate schedule. Now I realize that it probably allowed him to sleep in and us to stay up later, but we were none the wiser. Daily we played games, wrote skits, went swimming, and competed for cleanest cabins. We did all the regular stuff, but it was more fun because there were rules and boundaries and points and collaboration and competition and a clear, mutual understanding of goals and performance and criteria for success. As a student, I got to learn more about the power of 'gamifying' something, and what effect it had on learners."

"Whether you're a student looking to get into the film industry or a teacher looking for reference points to help your pupils, you'll need all the online resources you can find. To make things a little easier for you, the film section of Tuppence Magazine has put together a list of the 25 best learning resources for film studies available online. It covers everything from film theory and study points to filmmaking, behind the scenes advice and useful inspiration, providing a wide range of options for teachers and students alike."

"Skitch is a fantastic tool for annotating images. It enables the user to precisely point to features of interest and add text. There are many ways this could be used. One instance is like the image above where I have added key questions to an image. This provides more focus than merely presenting a blank image and prompts discussion. Following on from this, I have given learners the blank background image and asked them to annotate theirs by answering the questions. Alternatively, a teacher could present a blank image and ask students to identify the key features and annotate it live, based on students feedback. Although this could have traditionally been done by projecting an image and annotating it using a whiteboard marker, the great thing about Skitch is that all of that great feedback is not lost: it's stored in a clear way which can then be distributed to students as a point of reference."

Online classes may be a relatively young instructional practice for K-12 schools, but experts already generally agree on one point: Research shows that virtual schooling can be as good as, or better than, classes taught in person in brick-and-mortar schools.

"GeoCon Math is a new iPad app for students, teachers and math enthusiasts to study plane geometry in an interesting and exciting way. GeoCon HD re-invents the study of plane geometry by empowering users to create various geometric constructions with the touch of a finger. The app also offers easy tutorial steps that provide instruction on setting and moving points, constructing lines and circles, and creating intersection points."

"One of the biggest stumbling blocks on our road to successful iPad implementation was WiFi coverage and bandwidth. The Information Services department had to install new access points and optimize the access points we already had. We also found that we did not have enough bandwidth. Every time I launched a new App to the 200+ iPads on campus we exceeded our bandwidth and took every other Internet based function off line. Eventually though we did get our bandwidth more than doubled and that was very helpful."

"Tim, a Director of Instructional Technology from El Paso, Texas, gives a strong account of how iPad can be used as a tool for creation. He clearly details some of the concrete ways that the often-defended tablet can be used to produce videos, music, drawings, and works of art that move well beyond consumption. Kim, on the other hand, offers a unique perspective as an educator who has recently transitioned from supporting an iPad environment to using a Chromebook as his primary device. In his post, 3 Reasons Why Chromebook Beats iPad in 1:1 Programs, Kim gives the following three reasons for the superiority of the Chromebook: Chromebooks are for creating, and iPads are for consuming The App vs the Web The Google Ecosystem for Collaboration The most viable of these three reasons from Kim is the final one, the collaborative tools that are inherent in the Google ecosystem can be accessed seamlessly on a Chromebook. While iOS device access to Google tools continues to become less and less of an issue, schools that want to focus primarily on Google tools should look no further than Chromebooks. However, I would like to challenge Kim's first two points. As he notes in his discussion around his first point, the consumption versus creation debate with iPads and Chromebooks has been made countless times by those on both sides of this discussion."

Microsoft has added a wonderful Windows repair tool to find a quick way out of Windows problems. This is actually a reverse gear, which you can use to alter any changes that might have incurred to the operating system due to faulty software or driver update, virus or malware attack, incompatible driver, or more. So don't forget to create Restore Point within a reasonable timeframe-say, the last couple of months to stay safe.