Learning in Progress

At the end of the 2016-2017 school year, we were very fortunate to have a three day Project Based Learning (PBL) workshop led by Drew Perkins , Director of Professional Development at TeachThought . For me, the three day workshop was an opportunity to fine tune my understanding of PBL, work with teachers on new ideas and dig into strategies that can help teachers think through the planning process. Day 1: Aligning from the Top Down Some of my big takeaways from the first day of our professional development with Drew was that when designing a project with specific skills or standards in mind, it helps to begin by brainstorming possible products, purpose and audience and projects, in terms of Bloom's Taxonomy , really start at the top and as students work  through the project they move down into understanding and remembering.  In my role as coach, when I work with teachers to develop PBL, I think the audience piece is really important for us to consider more careful...

I couldn't narrow it down to four actual things - but there are four topics to explore!  Pick something and play this summer to help refresh after a long school year. Hover over the image below for hot links to things to check out.  

At the end of last year when I took on the role as Technology Integration Specialist for the elementary schools in my district, my first major task, before my official start date, was to plan two days of professional development at the end of the year.  Day 1 was to get teachers acquainted with the SAMR model and the iPads that all students would be receiving in August, and Day 2 was to introduce teachers to Project Based Learning (PBL) . The iPad training was an ok start.  It was differentiated, with different teams leading sessions based on teacher experience.   When I reflect back on it now, we should have stuck with two days of iPad training, but one school already had a plan to spend a day with a book study on PBL, as a way to get teachers started with it, and the other schools decided to join in.  The deck was a bit stacked against us, we didn't have copies of the book for each person, two schools were entirely unfamiliar with the concept, and I was reall...

  This post or iginally appeared on FTISE dTech Math makes me nervous. And, not your run of the mill, mild, tingle in your belly kind of nervous. It's the kind of nervous that literally initiates the fight or flight response, where every neuron is on edge, skin feels prickly to the touch and a waterfall of tears is being held back by not even a shred of willpower: I t's the kind of nervous that shuts a learner totally down.     Needless to say when I wrote a grant for a 3D printer last year, I wasn't thinking that I would actually have to use math to use it.  I mean, my general plan was that the kids would figure out how to use it, and I would just cheer them on, and probably tweet about the cool stuff they were doing.  And then it became apparent that I had to learn how to use it. For real use it. As a last minute challenge, one of our district technicians, Andrew, talked me into meeting him and Michelle, one of our second grade teachers after sc...

This post first appeared on FTISEdTech Recently, while trying to help one of our Music teachers hack a lesson that included a paid app that we don't have access to, I discovered a strategy for using the Duck, Duck Moose apps - Draw& Tell , Superhero Comic Maker , or Princess Fairy Tale Maker combined with Green Screen by Do Ink that allows you to create a layered green screen videos that makes it look like students are interacting with comic book style characters. Create your Animation To make it look like you or your students are are between a background and the animation, you will want to create a "green screen" animation by either using the picture of a green screen or by filling in the background of a blank scene with green. You will then set your scene.  Add writing, characters or letters.  Stickers will move during recording.  You can also add voice overs while you're recording, or maybe play a song in the background.  Whatever audio you ha...

This year I am so glad to have discovered the power of using digital style interactive notebooks with students. As a new Technology Integration Specialist in a district that has recently adopted a digital conversion process at the elementary level, I was looking for ways teachers could integrate our new technology while maintaining teaching practices they were most familiar with. As a result, I turned back to the work of Robert Marazano  and the research his group has done in regards to High Yield Strategies for teaching and learning, and I began to re-examine some of the texts I had used as a new teacher a few moons ago.   By looking at High Yield strategies, I was able to begin the process of identifying ways that we could incorporate tech into every day activities like reading assignments and vocabulary.   I settled on the idea of adapting those strategies into interactive notebook style that I was seeing on a variety of websites in digital form and that s...