Smart Solutions K-12 Digital Academy Success
May 29, 2009
Hello! My name is Michele Gasser and I am a recent addition to the Smart Solutions K-12 team. In my role as a Professional Development Specialist, I work with Ohio school districts to help teachers learn 21st century technology tools to enhance student learning. When I joined the team in January, I hit the ground running with my first project, a Digital Academy designed for Brunswick City Schools in Brunswick, Ohio.
Kicked off in February, the nine-week program included three groups of elementary, middle and high school teachers from throughout the district. These teachers met once a week for face-to-face sessions and supplemented their learning with a Moodle course custom-designed to their needs.
The focus of the academy was to learn about the exciting ways that web 2.0 tools would enhance not only their personal learning but their teaching style as well. By the end of the nine weeks, I was hearing comments from teachers on how much more engaged their students were. The new technology certainly made an impact in their classrooms. We covered a broad range of topics including Social Bookmarking, Blogs, Wikis, Moodle, SMART Notebook software, SMART Sync classroom management software, Google Docs, Google Forms and more! (By the way, you may be familiar with some of these tools and some of them you may not. Look for more information on these in future posts.)
One of the goals of the Digital Academy was for participants to learn how to collaborate and make a team wiki. The wiki would be used to share quality lesson plans and as a one-stop-shop technology resource for the other teachers in the district. The resulting Brunswick etoos4teachers wiki is a great example of their collaborative effort and mastery of the new skills learned throughout the course.
It was exciting for me as an instructor to watch the enthusiasm for technology grow and it was just as exciting for the teachers to see the same results in their students. Just days after the Digital Academy finished up, I received a wonderful email from a kindergarten teacher with a link to a Mother’s Day project her kindergarten students made in Voicethread (one of the tools we explored in class). Their slide-show presentation consisted of students’ drawings of their mothers accompanied by audio clips of the students’ Mother’s Day greetings. It is absolutely delightful to see children this young interacting with technology. What a great way to introduce them to the 21st century!
Results like this are what make my work so rewarding. I look forward to sharing more success stories with you in the future.
21st Century Professional Learning – Powerful Learning Practice
April 6, 2009
The following guest post was written by Lani Ritter Hall, an instructional designer for online professional development, and former teacher for 35 years.
We hope you can join Sheryl and Will for an informational webinar session on April 14, 2009 at 10 AM, or, April 23, 2009 at 2 PM.
Contact Lani Ritter Hall, lanihall [at] windstream [dot] net or Abby Kelton, akelton [at] smartsolutionsonline [dot] com, at Smart Solutions for additional information.
Please also check out this Webinar!
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21st century learners: connected, social, engaged, collaborating outside of school. Schools: isolated, competitive, irrelevant to many of those learners. This chasm grows wider daily, requiring leaps and “shifts” in our beliefs about learning to embrace tenets of networked learning that facilitates students reaching their full potential. For many educators, those shifts and leaps are intimidating and foreign as previous professional and personal learning experiences were disjointed and unrelated to the real world.
“Many teachers receive professional development that is episodic and disconnected from real problems and practice, said Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommon Professor of Teaching and Teacher Education at Stanford University. But research tells us that teachers need to learn the way other professionals do: continually, collaboratively and on the job.”
“Research shows that professional learning can have a powerful effect on teacher skills and knowledge and on student learning. To be effective, however, it must be sustained, focused on important content, and embedded in the work of collaborative professional learning teams that support ongoing improvements in teachers’ practice and student achievement.” National Staff Development Council
Aligned with Ohio Professional Development Standards and current research, Powerful Learning Practice (PLP), co founded by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson, offers a unique opportunity for educators to participate in a long-term, job-embedded professional development program through immersion in learning environments that allow them to learn and own the literacies of 21st Century learning and teaching.
During the initial 8 month cycle PLP participants learn together as part of a cohort composed of 20 school or district teams with 5 educators on each team and 10 “21st Century Fellows” selected from participating districts. Educators experience:
* Two full-day face to face workshops for cohort participants held at a regional site
* Five, two hour synchronous online 21st Century curriculum modules:
1. Setting the Stage: Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century – What is 21st Century learning? Why is it important? This session introduces the context, research and trends shaping the current shifts.
2. Network Literacy: Sharing, Cooperation and Collective Action – This session moves team members from talking about 21st century learning to examining some specific tools and how they are used to promote the building of Personal Learning Networks for sharing, cooperation, and collective action.
3. Network Driven Inquiry: Technological Pedagogy in Action – This session takes a closer look at the pedagogy involved in using web- based strategies to support passion-based and inquiry-driven approaches to learning.
4. Project Workshop – School teams have an opportunity to get feedback on their emerging team projects as well as showcase, reflect, and celebrate the success and outcomes of their learning
5. Long Range Planning and Implementation Workshop – Working with school teams to develop a collective vision and implementation plan to build momentum for change in their schools and districts.
* Immersion in an asynchronous Virtual Learning Community
* Ongoing capacity building with 21st Century Fellows
As educators build these communities of learning that exist outside of traditional time and place, vastly different from schools they attended as children, they find the connections and opportunities they can build with the new emerging medias are key to powerful learning. Powerful Learning Practice understands these connections and understands that the tools are easy; it’s the connections that are hard.
Over 1000 educators worldwide have found PLP energizing, and transformative. Lisa, from the ADVIS cohort reflects upon her experience:
Boy, they weren’t kidding when they said this would be powerful! From the very first, I’ve done nothing but learn. I would admit, though, that a lot of what I’ve learned I had not expected to . . .
What I’ve come to realize is that, through PLP, we are gaining exposure to the world that our kids already inhabit easily – and learning in that environment is not neat and tidy. I wrote my first Ning post about ambiguity and how learning to live – and learn – in an ambiguous world is not easy. It requires openness to new experiences and letting-go of my tradition-based ideas of what schooling is. Learning is not linear, and while I’ve espoused that for years, it wasn’t until this experience of PLP that I was able to live the non-linear, sometimes frustrating, always interesting world of a 21st century learner . . .
Learn more about the current cohort activities from this newsletter and from the PLP website.
Then consider the chasm, consider the challenge, consider PLP! Can you afford not to? Participate in the upcoming 2009-10 Ohio cohort.
We hope you can join Sheryl and Will for an informational webinar session on April 14, 2009 at 10 AM, or, April 23, 2009 at 2 PM.
Contact Lani Ritter Hall, lanihall [at] windstream [dot] net or Abby Kelton, akelton [at] smartsolutionsonline [dot] com, at Smart Solutions for additional information.
21st Century Learning and Student Achievement
January 18, 2009
Click here to register.
Jay Matthews Changes his Mind about 21st Century Skills
November 30, 2008
A few weeks ago, I got in an e-mail discussion with Jay Matthews, the education reporter at the Washington Post. At the time, I felt that Matthews attack on 21st Century Skills was unfair, uninformed, and not constructive.
His response to me included this line: “You are the first email I have received that takes your side.”
Well, a few weeks later, Jay Matthews writes:
Now I am forced to calm down, take a breath and consider the possibility that I was wrong about this, because a scholar whose work I admire has produced the first sensible report on 21st-century skills I have read.
I suppose I wasn’t scholarly enough to change his mind, but it is great to see that he is being open-minded about his views on the topic.
(Thanks for the link DJ!)
Update: Here is a link to the report that Jay Matthews.