Category Archives: Professional Development

Why Consider Why?

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Why? One simple word can make all the difference. Whether planning a learning experience for young people or adults, “Why?” is an important place to start.  Today during the early Saturday morning educational Twitter chat I like to participate in, #SatChat, someone shared the following video, that made me start thinking about that little word: “why?”  Take a few minutes to watch:

Watching the video and reflecting a few minutes on it, reminded me of a conversation I’d had a day or two ago with colleague where I shared some thoughts I had after watching a TED Talk given by Simon Sinek, the author of “Start with Why.”  A few months back, I jotted a little “note-to-self” to look up “Sinek’s Golden Circle,” probably after reading about it on a blog or seeing it mentioned in a webinar.  I can’t even recall today where my first exposure to it was, but I can tell you that it motivated me enough to write myself a reminder to learn more about it!  I ran across my note the other day on one of the many Post-it notes that are on my desk, and I took a little break from work to start my research. I started by Googling the phrase and looking at some of the images that came up.  I dug into the concept a bit more and came across the following video of Sinek giving a TED Talk on his ideas.  The video is at the bottom of this post; it’s a little longer, but worth the watch.  I started thinking of all the applications the idea of “starting with why” has in the field of education, and I began to believe it is an important reminder to us as educators.  Children, young adults and especially adult learners we work with need to know the “WHY?” behind what we are teaching them.

Just as important as activating prior knowledge, explicitly pointing out the learning objectives for the lesson, or framing lessons within essential questions, the learners we work with need to know why what we have to say is important.  And for us to convey “The Why” to our students, we have to be able to articulate “The Why” ourselves.  So I challenge you today to add a step to your lesson planning or professional development planning that focuses on “The Why” of time you’ll spend with your learners.  What is “The Why?”  How will you communicate “The Why?”  See how it changes your planning process and delivery of your lesson or professional development!

 

 

Personalize Your Professional Learning!

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One of our optional tech training sessions I offered this summer was all about taking your professional learning into your own hands using technology tools. I put the resources I shared with participants into a LiveBinder to organize things and share some of my own thoughts and challenges with them, and I wanted to make it a little more accessible. So I’m posting access to the “binder” here on by blog as an embedded object for you all to use! Take a minute to comment and let me know what you like and what I should add to this binder! And have a great time learning about the things you’re passionate about!!

Click here to open this binder in a new window.

Maker Spaces: Reflections from #SatChat 11/1/14

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My responses from this morning’s chat:

 

Reflections from a Twitter Chat: Connected Educator Month

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As part of my “celebration” of October as Connected Educator Month, I thought I would post a short reflection following my Saturday morning Twitter chat today. I like to participate in #SatChat which occurs every Saturday morning at 6:30 am Central Time (where I live). It’s pretty early, but I’m a morning person, so I’m already “up” if not fully awake…a couple little dogs are on a morning routine that helps ensure that I’m ready to go when 6:30 rolls around. So I grab my coffee and log in to HootSuite, the tool I like to use to more easily follow the chat messages as they come in. This morning, I just climbed back in bed with my laptop and participated in my pjs…now that is some convenient professional learning, right there!

As I was participating in today’s topic of “Game Changers,” I was challenged by some of the questions the moderator posed, especially Q2: How does your philosophy of education impact student success? and Q4: Does your philosophy of education make you a game changer? So I thought about how I could have an increased impact and be more of a game changer. This reflection combined with Connected Educator challenges I’ve been working on resulted in a conviction to be more reflective and regular in my blogging practices. I frequently share things from my Saturday morning Twitter chats with individual teachers or administrators in our district, but I don’t know if I have ever actually blogged my reflections for all to see. Who knows…maybe someone, somewhere will read my reflection and be challenged to impact students under their direction in a positive way. So, here is my first post reflecting personally on #SatChat October 18, 2014:

Game changers are important to keep education moving because the world is constantly changing. We’ve all seen the quotes about how industry has changed so much in the last 100 years, but if a teacher from 100 years ago walked in to a school or classroom, they would know just what to do because education has changed very little while other industries have been through total transformations. I hope in the schools I support, a similar transformation is starting. We don’t need to change everything…just the things that are not the BEST. Keep what’s best and change the rest.

A couple of quick resources to share that I gleaned from this morning’s chat:

1.  An article to read about Rigor:  22 Ways to Add Rigor to Your Classroom

Although the term “rigor” is not a new one, the emphasis on rigor in education today is high.  We see it mentioned in new standards, new teacher evaluation tools, and lots of educational commentary.  I like the definition of Rigor from  The Glossary of Education Reform which includes this phrase:

” instruction, schoolwork,learning experiences, and educational expectations that are academically, intellectually, and personally challenging”

You can read the whole article explaining rigor here:  http://edglossary.org/rigor/

2.  A blog post that could challenge you, but also might help you maintain sanity as a teacher:  Buried Alive:  A Cautionary Tale about Piles of Work

In this post, Starr Sackstein reflects on sharing responsibility with students as a way to both empower students AND maintain a reasonable work load for the teacher.  While she is a journalism teachers, her post has relevance for teachers of all subjects.

In the future, I’ll try to be more reflective following my Saturday morning Twitter chats, so that others can also benefit from my early, weekend morning forays into professional learning in my pajamas!

Using Blogs as Part of Your Personal Learning Network

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As part of Connected Educator Month, I’m participating in Edublog’s PLN Teacher Challenge. Each step of the challenge focuses on a different aspect of developing a PLN, or Personal Learning Network. Step five focused on the use of blogs for enhancing your PLN. I use feedly.com as a blog aggregator to make following several blogs more convenient.
Feedly allows me to find bloggers I enjoy and have all their posts filter in to one single location so I can look at the headlines when I have time and read the posts which interest me most. I can add or remove blogs that I have “feed” in anytime, so If I’m working on a specific temporary project, I can add blogs that apply to it and then later I can remove them to help prioritize my time! Here is a screen shot of what Feedly looks like in case you’re interested:

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Along the left side you see the list of blogs which I have selected to follow. On the right side you see the headline view where I see a chronological listing of the headlines from the blogs feeding in. I can focus on one single blog at a time if I want by clicking on its title of the left. There are also some controls which allow me to mark posts a read or tag them for follow up. Clicking a headline, shows an overview of the first few lines of the post in this view with links to the actual website. If I select a blog title on the left, then expanding the headline allows me to read the entire post right inside Feedly without ever leaving.

I also try to post on my own blog and share my blog with others in my PLN to be a “contributor” to the field, and not just a “taker!” I don’t know how much other educators benefit from my blog, but I do know that the process of reflecting in writing has personal growth value to me even if no one reads what I have written. Organizing my thoughts and getting them down on screen is often a way for me to plan and brainstorm and fulfills a need for creativity that I have! Even though I am a bit sporadic on my blogging, I still keep trying to occasionally post!

Are YOU a Connected Educator?

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October is a month of many celebrations!  As a child, Halloween was always something to look forward to; the costumes, the candy, the running around the neighborhood unsupervised!!  It’s also Breast Cancer Awareness month…pink ribbon campaigns all around and Susan G. Komen’s name is everywhere.  And as the daughter of a breast cancer survivor, I honor it with all sincerity.

But did you know . . .

October is also the month we challenge educators to be Connected Educators?  There is a formal campaign to spread the word to educators everywhere on the value of being connected!  You can see the Connected Educator website here:  http://connectededucators.org/  I love the subtitle of this website:  “Helping Educators Thrive in a Connected World.”

So, in honor of October, Connected Educator Month, I challenge you to consider your own professional connectedness and to do one thing this month to begin developing or enhancing your Personal Learning Network.  Here is a great video to introduce the concept of what a PLN is and why its valuable:

As part of the first challenge of Connected Educators Month, I watched this video and added my comment about what a PLN is.  Here is how I commented:

The concept of a PLN for me has changed over the years that I’ve been in education (25!!). When I first started teaching, technology was limited and I relied on my building and district colleagues, professional reading, college courses I took and professional organizational memberships to continue to learn. Attending conferences introduced me to short-term connections to others, but not until email came in to the picture did long-term connections to others outside of my small rural Kansas school district become possible. My first long-term “expert” connection came through a partnership with the American Meteorological Society that paired science teachers with practicing meteorologists to increase our learning through in-person visits as well as course work faxed back and forth between the teacher and the meteorologist!! My first long-distance peer connection was with a teacher in the Boston area who I met through the online Monster Exchange project and with whom I emailed and exchanged drawings and writings of our classes by uploading projects to the project website.

Today the social media technologies that exist completely change the ease of connections and the variety of connections available to educators. It is exciting to me to see the opportunities that our young educators have for such professional growth early in their careers! It should be good for retention as well as improving the profession!

Respond in the comments about your own PLN or what you’ve done this month to begin or enhance it!  Happy Connected Educator’s Month!

Voki and Tellagami: Avatars for all Platforms

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Another project for the Digital Differentiation workshop I’m preparing! This time I was looking at avatar creation as a way to differentiate either the deliver of content to students or, even more excitingly, as a way to differentiate for demonstration of mastery of knowledge.

Students could create a Voki or Tellagami project that includes script-writing to show deep understanding of the content you’ve been working on. They could even make a series of these projects if the 30 second time limit isn’t long enough. If you’re lucky enough to be working on the iPad with both Tellagami and iMovie…smash those apps together! Record short Tellagami projects, save them to the iPad’s photoroll and then import them into iMovie to piece them together into one single movie!

Anyway, here are my two talking avatar projects for you to compare:
Tellagmi Project:

Voki Project: (Warning: Voki uses Flash and will not play on an iDevice.)

Differentiated Instruction: Video Playlist and Reading Selection

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As part of a workshop called “Digital Differentiation,” I’m providing this post as a way to model some alternate content delivery to the participants. The first link is to a reading selection from Edutopia. It’s followed by five short videos from The Teaching Channel. Spend some time exploring differentiated instruction in your own preferred format!

Reading Selection: Using QR Codes to Differentiate Instruction

Videos: Use the following videos to explore differentiated learning through a visual format. Thanks to Sarah Brown Wessling for compiling the playlist from The Learning Channel at her link here: https://www.teachingchannel.org/blog/2013/09/06/video-playlist-differention/
Differentiating Math Using Computer Games (Elementary) (6:00) (Differentiating Practice)
STEM Design Challenge: Edible Cars (14:00) (Differentiating for Demonstration of Mastery)

New Teacher Survival Guide: Differentiating Instruction (12:00)
Differentiating with Learning Menus (5:00)

Analyzing Texts: Putting Thoughts on Paper (5:18)

Gratitude Appy Hour

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The video in this post is a sample project I made in preparation for a training I’m planning called Gratitude Appy Hour which will introduce staff to two great, free iPad apps as well as the concept of app “smashing,” or using two apps together for one project. The staff have been invited to download both Haiku Deck and 30 Hands, free in the App Store. Since we are in the Thanksgiving season, I also asked them to jot down ideas of 3 – 5 things for which they are grateful.

We will start the the project by using Haiku Deck to find images to represent what they are thankful for. The Creative Commons search feature built into Haiku Deck is great to teach about copyright. We will also add words to the slides in Haiku Deck to explain the importance of the image they chose. Taking screenshots of each slide as the presentation is playing will be the next step in this project. Once the images with words are saved as photos in the camera roll, they can be imported onto 30 Hands which has the additional features of being able to add audio and even to save to the camera roll as a video file. So for each slide, the participants will record a short description of why they are thankful for the item on the slide.

We plan to wrap up the training with a brainstorming session about how the project can be adapted for the classroom. Here is my sample project video:

 

Sir Ken Robinson: How Technology is Transforming Education

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An update on what I’m doing for my own continued professional growth:  I’m participating in a MOOC at Desire2Learn.  If you’re not 100% sure what a MOOC is, here is a great video that explains the basics:

The course I’m enrolled in is titled “Teachers + Mobile Apps = Creative Classrooms.”  You can join us here by following this link.  In the introductory module, there was a required video viewing of a brief, but powerful video by Sir Ken Robinson that I feel is worth sharing.  Enjoy: