Rapid Implementation of New Technologies: From Teacher Learning to Presenting in Days!

Many teachers amazed me this week with the effort they devoted to take new learning with technology, implement immediately with their students, and be ready to share with other teachers within a week or two! At the Nebraska District Educator's Conference five TEC21 teachers presented topics including: setting up online portfolios for each member of your class using Seesaw, coding using code.org, flipping the classroom using Explain Everything to create videos and post at Schoology.org, setting up a class at Storyjumper.com and having students write digital stories, and creating stop motion movies and iMovies. Some of these teachers just learned about these tools a week ago at our TEC21 workshop. They went back to their classrooms and immediately engaged their students in these new digital learning activities. Then they prepared a presentation to teach other teachers how to do this with their students! Amazing! Genius!

Last night we had our best graduate class yet as teachers came together to share the unique ways they are integrating technology in their classrooms: Remind app to communicate with parents, Educreations to create a screencast, Photo Booth to record students' reading fluency, Storybird for special needs students to write digital stories, Seesaw to empower students to upload work into an online portfolio, Chatterpix to put mouths on pictures to allow them to talk, Nearpod to insert interactivities into presentations, and more! Amazing! Genius!

I am constantly reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers" where he explains that high-achievers invest 10,000 hours to become experts. For teachers to become experts at technology integration they too need to invest much time with technology: exploring, playing, collaborating, teaching, learning. When teachers invest the time to learn a new technology, they benefit, their students benefit, and the teachers with whom their share their expertise benefit! Remember the teaching uses with technology that you may think are obvious, may be amazing to another teacher. As Donald Leu finds in his research, "no one person can be expected to know everything there is to know about the technologies of literacy...Each of us, however, will know something useful to others."

So share what you know! Most technologies have not been around long enough for people to be experts. We all have something to contribute to this new area of teaching. What genius things are you doing and how are you sharing them with colleagues?

Take two minutes to watch this brief video "Obvious to You, Amazing to Others" as you consider what you do that will be genius to others!

Here's to becoming a technology integration expert to benefit your students!

A Piktochart on Blogging with Students across the Curriculum

Blogging with Students across the Curriculum

Nebraska District Educator's Conference

October 27, 2015

I share one great example of how quickly effective technology uses can be shared between teachers.

Last Saturday at Tech EDGE 15 presenter Nate Balcom shared Piktochart as a way to create infographics. Guy Trainin saw the presentation and suggested we make a Piktochart for our presentation at Nebraska District Educator's Conference today. Teachers attending the session learned not only the blogging information we included in our Piktochart, but also began making their own Piktocharts! Another teacher who attended Tech EDGE went home and created a Piktochart for her class. She shared this last night in our graduate class and now other teachers in the class are making Piktocharts too! What a ripple effect is possible when teachers share their ideas with others. With the rapidly changing technology, this is the way to stay current. Share!

This is the Piktochart we made. If you click on the title above it will take you to the interactive version of this infographic with videos, blogs, and websites linked. Try making a Piktochart yourself!

Assessing Student Learning through Apps, Games, & Projects

Today we presented Tech EDGE 15: Assessment of Learning through Apps, Games, & Projects.

In our visits to classrooms Guy Trainin and I are seeing teachers using innovative 21st century instruction. The next big step after innovating practice is figuring out how to evaluate innovative student products. We pulled together innovative educators from the field to share innovations in teaching and the evaluation practices that come with them.

We began with a Keynote by William Vann, Instructional Technology Coordinator at Immanual Lutheran School in St. Charles, MO. Under the title Authentic Moments: Maintaining Student Authenticity with Technology, Will led over 120 preservice and inservice teachers on a journey to his classroom to create circuits using a Makey Makey and use that device to play games and musical instruments online. Through expert questioning by the teacher and trial and error by students, they begin to understand what makes a circuit and how to use it productively. Will summarized the authentic moment as:

• forming lasting learning that "comes from a culmination of learning through our frustrations and failures," yet it's what we remember for a lifetime.
• "Creativity is an outlet for that moment."
• "The authentic moment is accessible for all students."

Will helped teachers set guidelines for student performance that meet standards. He suggested such rubric areas as: does the project work? did they create clear instructions for use? can it be reproduced?

Other teachers shared ideas for integrating technology to engage students as they teach content and collect data about learning across the curriculum at the same time. Examples shared include:

• Kahoot and Quizizz to get every student response
• Google Classroom and Actively Learn to organize learning and give formative assessments during reading
• engaging students in blogging and providing instant feedback online to improve writing and clarify content
• critical thinking via Minecraft for alternative assessments that clarify learning
• students creating iMovies and online graphic organizers to demonstrate learning
• gamifying the classroom emphasizing engagement and individual accountability
  

The expert teachers provided examples of how they assess creative student products for ISTE Standards and Common Core State Standards. Students ARE learning as they create innovative multimedia projects that demonstrate learning. We would be interested to know how you know your students are learning when they use technology in learning.