SMART Board tips from TIES

Here are a few SMART board tips I learned at the TIES confrence.  Click the link below to watch the youtube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn_Q1kfMsR0

Answering the questions: What can I do with Interactive Video Conferencing and why is it important? By Carole Velasquez

I attended Traveling Minnesota Virtually to Meet STEM and Arts Standards and was excited to learn how to use video conferencing and how local and global organizations are supporting STEM in the classroom.  

Tami Moehring, MN Historical Society representative, explained how a videoconference project gives you and your student an opportunity to learn and interact with another school or classroom around the world without leaving your classroom.  I found this extremely timely, since I have a student moving to Africa and the parents want to stay linked to our STEM curriculum. 

Exploring for our upcoming first grade rock and soil unit, the Grand Canyon lesson opportunities via video conferencing support our standards.  “Do you live hundreds or thousands of miles from Grand Canyon National Park, but wish you could bring your class to the canyon? Why not invite a virtual ranger to your classroom? For schools with video-conferencing equipment, we offer geology and ecology-based educational programs via two-way conferencing over the Internet.” (Source: http://www.nps.gov/grca/forteachers/upload/TestProgramMailout2011-2012.pdf)

Listed below are some helpful ideas and websites, which provide students with communication and global literacy skills and teachers with collaboration opportunities:

• Videoconference Project Book
  https://files.pbworks.com/download/cw1u5nQxP8/collaborativevcs/30633329/ProjectsBooklet.pdf?ld=1
• Grand Canyon – http://www.nps.gov/learn/distance.htm (exploring for the First Grade Rock Unit) 
• International Wolf Center – http://www.wolf.org/wolves/experience/podcasts.asp (offering free sessions and materials via video conferencing) 
• Center for Puppetry Arts – http://www.puppet.org/edu/distance.shtml (Literacy and Science connection) 
• Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration - http://www.cilc.org/ 
• Minnesota Interactive Learning Collaboration - https://sites.google.com/a/mnhs.org/milc/

"Flipped" Professional Development by Tony Eatchel

During my time at TIES I was focusing on Technology Coaching and Professional Development.  What really caught my eye was the “flipped” model of Technology Professional Development.  Flipped Professional Development can transform teachers through personalized online instruction and face-to-face workshop time with technology integration specialists.

The key to a Flipped program is having online Tutorials, Videos, and How To’s that teachers can easily access and watch when ever they have the time.  Then teachers can come to the Technology Specialist with specific questions and issues.

Currently we have a good number of video tutorials, district created tutorials and links that have already been created.  In the coming months we will build a page of the links so our staff can access them and work through some basic Technology content knowledge.  Our goal as a staff is to use our Technical, Pedagogical and Content knowledge together to create lessons that are meaningful and engaging for our students!

Technology, Pedagogy, Content Knowledge (Venn)

Creating Innovators at TIES 2012

After seeing the Keynote speaker Dr. Tony Wagner, I began to think of how the STEM classroom can become a catalyst for creating young innovators. 

Dr. Wagner maintains if the following three elements are developed by parents, teachers and mentors an enormous difference can be make in the lives of young innovators.

• Play
• Passion 
• Purpose

 Play:
An child's imagination which explores different worlds, learning new ideas and reflecting on possibilities is a form of play.  The research about the importance of play spans many decades.  Maria Montessori, Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget have all done groundbreaking research on the importance of play.  Play is a part of human nature and an intrinsic motivator.

Passion:
Passion is the intrinsic motivation to explore something new, understand something more deeply and master something difficult.  In his book The Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the importance of working at something for ten thousand hours in order to achieve mastery.  Gladwell identifies famous innovators such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.   Their time spent on their products was passion driven.

Purpose:
As much as passion drives young innovators, purpose is far more deeper and more sustainable.  This sense of purpose can take many forms, Dr. Wagner found the greatest purpose, the desire to somehow make a difference in the world.

I hope you enjoy this TED talk from Tony Wagner:

How are you providing PASSION, PLAY and PURPOSE in your classroom?

2012 Ties Conference

The TIES 2012 conference made me wish I could be in two places at once and then made me believe there would soon be an app for that. 

The Stillwater Area Schools, which use a tech coaching model as we do, showcased several elementary student projects.  Some of my favorites included one in which selected first graders used i Books Author to write a children’s book, illustrate it with scanned-in student art or with photographs, and then record it read aloud by using a Widget to move an audio file into the book.  Special Education teachers used a similar format to write short, story-based lessons on social skills, such as Quiet Hands, Sometimes I Get Sad, and Sometimes I Get Mad. Some were illustrated with drawings and some with photos of the targeted student himself using the correct behavior.  Another involved collaboration between elementary student authors and high school students enrolled in American Sign Language classes. Young authors wrote text and recorded their stories and illustrations. The finished products were downloaded to i Pads, so anyone in the district could view the elementary students’ images and hear them reading the story aloud as a high school student simultaneously signed the text in ASL.

A fifth grade group interviewed residents at a Retirement Center in order to write their biographies.  Three students would team up with each participating resident.  The students gathered information about each stage of the senior’s life.  They used iMovie and cooperatively compiled and edited the scripts, which were filed in Google Docs, then recorded and edited the sound using Audacity and Captasia.  The students shared responsibility for getting permissions, planning the steps and managing the various source files using Google Docs.  Each of twenty residents, or (unfortunately) their surviving families, received an iBook biography containing five or six chapters.

Other projects included digital student portfolios, student recorded videos on topics such as Digital Citizenship and Preventing Cyber Bullying, and fifth graders writing graphic novels on the Civil War. Another potentially effective project was fourth grade blogs in which students rotated responsibilities for recapping the week’s learning in each of the subject areas.  This might prove to be a good way to review and allow for needed repetition on the previous week’s lessons, as well as writing practice for the bloggers.

I attended a session on Visualization, which emphasized the importance of using visual images during our teaching to be sure students get a good enough picture in their minds to help them grasp content.  The most important take-away for me was an introduction to two new NASA websites.  One is Eyes on Earth NASA, which would be helpful for teaching earth science topics, and the other is Eyes on the Solar System NASA. We have used other solar system sites from NASA in our third grade unit, but this new one will enrich our study of the solar system by allowing us to look at features such as comets, asteroids, planets and galaxies separately and view celestial bodies from many different perspectives, very interactively.

Janet Henk