April+ISTE+Video+Reflections

April ISTE Video Reflections:

Collaboration Fluency: Creating a Learning Environment for the Digital Age Classroom--Lee Crocket

The presentation was a great one!! Lee Crocket went at light-speed trying to explain creative potential. The first question posed was whether the school was dealing mostly with short term or long term goals. This was pretty poignant, as it really made me take pause and think about where we are in this as far as a school district. He asked many pertinent questions that dealt with the critical skills that students need to be successful in life beyond school. He broke it down into several facets. First, he mentioned problem solving. Second, he mentioned being creative. Next, he brought up thinking analytically. Next, he brought up the ability to seamlessly collaborate with others and then communicate with others about their findings. Finally, he brought up the ethics, actions and accountability required to do the work properly. He kept bringing up the fact that most of these 21st century skills are not found in any curriculum guide or aren't being a guaranteed part of the curriculum. We just “hope” is shows up. If this is our long-term goal set. What do we do with our short term goals? He also took the time to bring up the fact that we teachers all face...the state tests. How do we take the time to do the 21st century skills and not give up our successes with the standardized tests? His answer came with the explanation of changing the learning environment by doing “velcro” learning, which meant that interest precedes learning. How are we stimulating our students to WANT to learn? Making connections through whatever method/means we can...even if it is through cartoons, movies, or other relevant material. It has to be relevant for students or learning will not happen. Through Bloom's, he really helped me to realize that what I was doing in my classroom was right, but now my job will be much bigger. How do I expand this to other classrooms in my new role next year? He gave some great ways to do this. I was so swamped in trying to take notes, that I actually watched it more than once and will be saving this for our teachers to watch during inservice. Probably the easiest way to remember what was in this video was the equation he shared fairly early on in the presentation. It was: Relevance + Creating + Real-World= 21st Century Learning. This will be my goal to get across to teachers next year. Going back to “will they be ready for the test”, the study done showed that both groups did the same. Why change then?? The test is not about life. The test is about regurgitating facts. “Educational Bulimia”. However, a year later, the same exam showed that the 21st Century group was significantly more successful, as they were much more likely to take the knowledge to build the information into their own life and build upon it further. This will be key for my teachers to see as we move toward our 1:1 environment.

7 Free Mobile Participation Apps-Crystal Lindsay and Michael Dreyfus This was a great little presentation on some free web tools that teachers can use to increase participation in their classrooms. While I have used some of them pretty extensively for my own use, I decided to watch it to see how each could be better used within my own classroom. Twitter, Diigo, PollEverywhere, and Google Forms are already used by me quite often. However, the presentation gave me more ideas for ways I could generate feedback with my students and ask different types of questions to get different responses and even daily feedback on what was learned (like a ticket out the door). I had heard of Google Moderator, but had never used it. It seems like it might be a neat way to have kids respond, especially since we are now a Google Apps school. Wiffiti I had never heard of before. I logged on and signed up (the name changes in the URL when doing so), but it seems like a very cool "board" for posting information and reminds me a little of Wallwisher in its presentation method. Overall, this was an informative video. It gave me a few new ideas and reinforced what I was doing with old ideas to make my students more accountable and deeper thinkers who dare to share with others.