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"So, what's a leader and the school to do? How do we create "checks" to serve as guideposts toward success?  One potential way may be a novel idea in education.  Use teachers and educators that have experienced success in building instructional capacity to be "scouts" for other teachers and schools that are building capacity in a meaningful way.  What I mean by 'scouts' is that these individuals would be charged with working next to teachers and school leaders to develop and refine instructional capacity, but when "it" shows itself in the form of meaningful and intentional classroom instruction or PLCs that really improve student performance, the 'scouts' chronicle this story.  The 'scouts' dual responsibility is to not only share in the building of the capacity, but to also spread the good news when it's been accomplished. In doing so, the profession of teaching and learning, can begin to articulate and share in these guideposts toward meaningful capacity.  What's missing in this dynamic are the 'scouts' that are embedded in several classrooms, schools and districts simultaneously and use this experience to improve the work simultaneously.  What's crucial about this approach is that it isn't 'helicoptered in' and is never something done 'to' teachers.  The work of the 'scout' is to find, develop, and refine great teaching and learning and use this as a way to scale up the work so that more and more students can have access to highly effective teaching and learning. " This article, specifically this annotated section, really spoke to me and made me think about what the two main initiatives of our department - Henrico 21 and Reflective Friends, should look like. It shouldn't be something that is "helicoptered in" or "done to teachers," but instead should be about developing, refining, promoting, and sharing good teaching.

"We are math teachers who share what we've learned, cause we don't want our classes to suck the energy from students. Professional development among friends, not just colleagues. Fun! Immediately useful! Interesting!" The Conference Tab on this page contains video archives of previous meetings. Some of the previous meetings include tips and tricks for using Mathalicious and Desmos in your classroom.

Do you teach struggling readers? No matter the content area that you teach, student success is often defined by literacy. Reading comprehension and vocabulary frequently act as roadblocks that prevent students from grasping difficult concepts. Rewordify is a tool that will help you ignore this roadblock, and even teach reading comprehension and vocabulary when used appropriately. I initially read about the tool from this blog post (http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2013/08/rewordify-helps-students-read-complex.html#.UhuJ79KsiSp). If you don't have time to check out that entire post, here is a brief summary of the tool and a few possible uses for it: Tool Description: This online tool allows the user to input a chunk of text and replaces all the "hard words" with synonyms. This seems like a spectacular tool to promote reading comprehension across the content areas. Here a just a couple ways you could use this tool. * Have you found a website with incredible information, but the reading level is way too high for your students? Have the students use Rewordify and make the reading level more appropriate for your students. * This could be a great tool to teach new vocabulary and reading comprehension. Here's one idea on how to do this: o Have students read a passage and highlight/underline/annotate the passage, including making notes of the words that they don't understand. Then, have the students summarize what they have read. Input the same text into rewordify and have the students read and summarize what they have read a second time. Compare the two summaries and discuss any similarities/differences. Now, have the students create definitions for the words that were highlighted (Students cannot use the provided synonym when completing this portion of the activity). William Berry Dept. of Organizational Development, Quality and Innovation Moody Middle School ITRT - (804) 261-5015 http://blogs.henrico.k12.va.us/techtips/ http://blogs.henrico.k12.v

For math people, this guy is very solid on how you develop the patterns of thought and understanding.

In mid-April, we went live with a half dozen articles which we call "stubs." The idea here is to plant a flag in a story right away with a short post--a "stub"--and then build the article as the story develops over time, rather than just cranking out short, discrete posts every time something new breaks. One of our writers refers to this aptly as a "slow live blog."

This is the Newest webtool developed by Dan Meyer and Dave Major. Dan Meyer discusses the tool and task in a post on his blog here - http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=17503 I think this tool would be very engaging for students. Give them the task of finding the quickest route, and they will go nuts with it. I see two main applications for this particular tool/task: You could use this tool as an introduction to angles. Put it on the board, give the kids the task, and have them discuss how they would tell the ship captain to navigate around the buoys. When non-mathematical language and vocabulary bogs down the ship's progress, overlay a grid/protractor and introduce the idea of angles. Have the kids play around with the tool to come up with the quickest route. Discuss the result of small differences in angle measurement on the ship's progress (each degree above the necessary increases the amount of time lost). This could lead into a discussion on the importance of precision… This would be an easy task to make over if you wanted to talk about slope and writing equations of lines (Algebra I). You could overlay a grid on the board, The kids could draw the lines in to get the ships around the buoys, write the equations, then you could talk about how cumbersome the equations are and how ships are actually piloted and bring in the idea of degrees/vectors (direction and angle). Not only does this tool help to teach angles/vectors, but it's also a tool to get students estimating (angles AND distance).

Wiki designed to connect TPACK with curriculum based learning activities. Aligned to specific content areas. Will be interested to see how this wiki develops over time.

"Mark talked about the idea of using Evidence-Based Arguments as a starting point. Every historical investigation needs to begin with a great question. Then they asked kids to do research and create videos. But what they got was disappointing. What they got was basically text with pictures, a script with a background. It wasn't a story, it wasn't engaging, and it often didn't really answer the question.  They begin to realize that they needed to learn more about how to create high-quality documentaries, how to use images and video to actually tell a story. And eventually they came up with a Four Step Process that students work through to create high-quality documentaries:" 4 Step Process for creating HST videos. I don't necessarily agree with the author's thought that tech should not be introduced until step #4, as tech can enhance 1-3 just as well. The teacher just needs to model good behavior and help students develop structures for the work in these phases for it to be successful.

"Mathsframe has more than 170 free interactive maths games. All resources are designed, by an experienced KS2 teacher, to help children to visualise numbers, patterns and numerical relationships and to develop their mathematical thinking. New games are added most weeks." Some of these seem more appropriate for elementary school, but there are definitely some that could serve as quick review for our 6th-8th graders. You could have students use these games for several minutes individually in the class, or have students use a Promethean board/slate to interact with the game in front of the class and discuss their reasoning for the answers they select. This could be a great informal feedback tool that would take very little prep time.

I'm sure this map holds a ton of possibilities that I know I'm not seeing immediately. Here are some things I am thinking: 1. Where is the windiest/least windiest location on earth? Why is that the case? 2. Where would be the ideal place to put a "wind farm?" 3. Let's check out that hurricane that's developing...

"Solving a math problem means unfolding a mystery, enjoying the pleasure of discovery. But in every geometry lesson that year, I blundered along and blurted out the secret. With a few sentences, I'd manage to ruin the puzzle, ending the feast before it began, as definitively as if I'd spat in my students' soup. Math is a story, and I was giving my kids spoilers." This post speaks directly to math, but can be applied to any content. When we provide students with the answers rather than developing lessons that let the students ask (and answer questions), we take the fun out of learning.

How can a game help students develop mathematical habits of mind? "Then we talked about the game for a bit, and discussed the "habits of mind" they had employed to figure out the game - noticing and wondering, guessing and checking, persevering, struggling productively, learning from mistakes without worrying about making mistakes (since they knew the only way they were going to make progress was to make mistakes and learn from them), and working together. We talked about how these skills are as important as any content they learn in their school classes, and how they can use those skills to make progress on math problems they're not sure how to solve. In fact, much of the math programming we did the rest of the year employed huge doses of Noticing and Wondering and generating ideas about math situations, or scenarios (a math problem with no stated question). Anecdotal reports suggest that by the end of the year, most of the students felt pretty confident that they could generate ideas about most math situations we handed them. Big win!"

With the demand for JavaScript growing and expanding, programmers required an easier method and a library of tools to develop dynamic interfaces, presenting an opening in the computer language industry for JavaScript libraries.

"Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) is a system developed at UCLA for coordinating and evaluating peer reviews of student work. In CPR, students review one another's assignments in an anonymous system, providing feedback to other students while also learning how to recognize strengths and weaknesses of their own efforts. Peer review might hold particular promise for MOOCs and other high-enrollment courses that struggle with assessment and feedback, though the benefits of peer review can apply to any community of learners, large or small. "

"Too often kids have trouble with word problems. Too often they don't know what to do with two numbers let alone a bunch of numbers. They guess at division when one number is big and one is small. They add when they see two fractions. They multiply because that was how they solved the last word problem. I will also do this with my 8th graders because I suspect they will have trouble too. And this is exactly the kind of trouble we need to get into. Now rather than later. This task gets them thinking about ratios - which is like the most important math thing in all of the math things." This is a short description of how to get your students developing questions for mathematical scenarios. This would be a great activity to work on if you feel like your students are having difficulty deciphering word problems or are stumped when presented with unfamiliar mathematical scenarios.

Don't know if anyone else has this this, but it looks interesting. You can request the resources to be shared with you - I did for Moody. I will check out the resources when I have a chance and share what I find.

""I think competitive character people don't want to be manipulated constantly to do what one individual wants them to do," Popovich said, "It's a great feeling when players get together and do things as a group. Whatever can be done to empower those people."" Applications for classroom and for our job as ITRTs. ...and I just love Popovich.

Best Slate Article Ever? You decide

On Monday, Google released a beta version of something they're calling Tour Builder. It doesn't let you create a full-fledged Google Earth tour with all the bells and whistles but it is a very quick and easy way for you and your students to develop a pretty sweet product.