"I can die happy now :) I have seen learning in the 21st Century modern classroom!
The learning just oozes through the cracks of the physical classroom walls.
Learning is amplified by the amount of people who are collaborating, participating, communicating and creating. The learning is NOT about the technology tools, but what students can DO with them to learn in new ways. The learning is about an authentic tasks, that allows students to contribute in a individualized and personalized manner to make them realize that their work matters in the real world.
It all started out with a conversation between Mike Fisher and me. He had written over 40 children poems and was in the process of wondering what to do with them? I was looking for an authentic task for 9-11 year old students. We felt we had a perfect match! How about getting the students Language Arts and Art teacher involved? The initial idea was to make a unit of poetry come alive, study Mike's poems and visualize the poems by creating illustrations."
" From Visible Thinking Routines to 5 Modern Learning Routines January 11, 2015 - Featured Carousel, Learning, Sketchnoting, Visible Thinking Routine - no comments I have been a fan of Visible Thinking Routines which were developed by Project Zero from Havard, for a while now. I have used these routines with students, as blogging routines and in professional development workshops."
"There is a lot of thoughts and ideas about what learning in the 21st century is supposed to look like. Most likely you are constantly bombarded with books, workshops, keynote presentations, webinars and good old lectures (yes, even on the topic of modern learning…) that remind you that it is time to upgrade traditional teaching and learning."
"I believe we are on our way of taking a modern classroom learning opportunity and upgrading assessment forms to match new skills and new literacies while not forgetting traditionally assessed ones.
We took a classroom Twitter feed (Part One) , looked at the conversation skills students exhibited during the Skype call (Part Two) and now are moving on to looking at "blog post writing" as assessment.
Keeping a previously created blogging rubric in mind, we took a closer look at the blog posts written by the 4th and 5th graders during the actual skype call and edited and formatted after the call had ended."
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An Update to the Upgraded KWL for the 21st Century
June 12, 2015 - Featured Carousel, Information, Learning, Modern Learning - 4 comments
In 2011, I wrote a blog post, titled Upgrade your KWL Chart to the 21st Century. It described how I learned about a new version of the traditional KWL (What do I Know, What do I Want to know and what have I Learned) via Chic Foote as it snuck in an "H"(How will I find out). That "H" seemed to make the increased importance of the information literacy visible. I ended up on Maggie Hos-McGrane's blog, which, according to John Barell's book Why are School Buses always Yellow?, added yet two other abbreviations ("A"- What action will I take and "Q"-What further Questions do I have?) to make up a KWHLAQ acronym."
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Sharing and Building Upon
April 18, 2015 - Collaboration, Featured Carousel, Modern Learning - 2 comments
How can I make it even MORE visible that sharing our work as educators is one of the critical components of the "learning revolution"?
Sharing means amplification. Amplification means spreading good practices, reaching more people and connecting beyond our own limitations of zip codes and language barriers. I have written and tweeted over and over again about the need and benefits of sharing among educators for educations and learning."
"Recently, I tried to explain to a teacher from another school how we are trying to use iPads BEYOND apps. We have over 100 apps on our school iPads and introduce our students according to age level to a variety of them, but the focus of the use of the devices NEEDS to remain primarily as a tool for:
exposing students to skills, characteristic of a "modern learner"
critical thinking
personal learning
transformative learning
workflow fluency
anytime/anywhere/anyhow
creating"
"I had a wonderful modern learning experience this past school year Skyping into a first-grade class in Jacksonville, Fla. This first-grade class is learning geography (as well as global perspectives!) through an activity that they call "Mystery Skyping." The teachers connect with someone via Skype somewhere in the world. That person Skypes in and the students get to ask questions to discover where in the world that person is. I was so excited to participate and be one of the "Mystery Skypers!""
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Copyright and Backchanneling in the Music Classroom
April 1, 2015 - Assessment, Documenting4Learning, Featured Carousel - 1 comment
This post is another one in the series of posts originating from Professional Development Framework: Documenting for Learning
Dani Aisen, a music teacher, at Mount Scopus Memorial College, was part of a small group session with Specialists (Resource teachers) during my visit at the school in Melbourne, Australia. It was an opportunity for these teachers to question and talk more in detail about the keynote presentation (Documenting FOR Learning & The Now Literacies Through the Lens of Sharing) and for me to share examples of how to support modern literacies in their specific subject areas."
"My colleague, Silvana Meneghini, and I have been working on developing a Professional Development framework for embedding technology use and modern learning litercies based on Ruben Puentedura's SAMR model."
"How do we learn vocabulary of a second, third or fourth language best? As a class, we discussed different methods including mnemonic devices and how they help us remember, organize and make connections in our brain. Some of us prefer:
visual connections
rhyming words
acronyms
a sentence in context
humorous connections
etc.
In order to embed modern skills and literacies and connect to our school's Core Values and mission, students created Popplets.
The tool (Popplet) allowed students to create a web based mind map. Each bubble/ "popplet"represented a vocabulary word related to medicine/illness/symptoms."
"As I am speaking of the benefits of blogging as a professional and student, I sometimes wonder if the word "blogging" is not a word we speak as we talk at cross-purposes with other educators. When I use the word "blogging", I am NOT seeing:
technology, a project, an add-on to the curriculum content.
When I use the word "blogging", I am seeing: learning how to read and write in digital spaces, the possibility of writing for an authentic global audience, a platform for reflection, investigation, documentation and curation, a platform that supports and amplifies modern skills and literacies. On the tails of Visible Thinking Routines for Blogging, comes this new blog post that wants to make Blogging VISIBLE!"
"Another glimpse into the classroom!
Previous video clips: Socratic Seminar & Backchanneling, Visible Thinking Routine: Chalk Talk, Mystery Skype Call, Collaborate & Curate
In the spirit of opening up classroom walls and creating a ripple effect of teaching and learning by sharing ideas, methods, action research and modern literacy upgrades, here is another video clip. You are watching a 7th grade Humanities classroom, led by their teacher David Jorgensen at Graded-The American School of São Paulo.
The students are reading The Giver, by Lois Lowry and have been annotating their thoughts as they are reading individual chapters in a Google Doc chart/table, labeled:
Observations
Inferences
Rituals
Questions/ Predictions"
"Twitter can be overwhelming, even for a seasoned Twitterer.
We use tools, such as Tweetdeck, to help us organize the tweets coming in
--we use #hashtags to filter and connect our conversations
--we @mention, we RT, we DM, we #FF
--we participate in #edchats
--we give credit where credit is due
--we take notes
--we disseminate interesting information to our network
--we amplify our voices to engage in conversation with people from around the world
Yes, it can be overwhelming to follow a conference Twitter hashtag such as #AASSA15 (Association of American Schools in South America Annual Educators Conference . (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3).
You will find a few sample sreenshots of Tweets from the AASSA conference in Curaçao. Unpacked and annotexted to make the value of Twitter as a Professional Development tool, a learning tool visible to the untrained eye."