Edina Digital Age Learning

Note: These are my notes from a panel at MDE on March 30. Realized today I never got it posted ... Mark Carlson from Edina, Mike Dronen , Wayne Feller and Kristin Daniels from Stillwater, and Chad Bray from Red Wing shared their experience of Flipped learning in the classroom. Carlson, who has been flipping his instruction 3 years ago, started off talking about the shift from "Did I cover this?" to "Do you understand this?" He noted that it is much more work, but he has much more one on one time with students . For some of the videos, he's on his 3rd or 4th edit, and he likes that if it isn't good, he can change it! All of his videos are on Youtube , and he has the student complete formative quiz questions in Moodle. Dronen, the Tech Director in Stillwater saw 4% growth in students MCAII questions after their 2 1/2 month pilot of flipped instruction. Staff told them that even if the district can't support it, they are going to make it a p...

Today Google announced a new Tool in Google Docs called "Research. " It allows you to either select the Tool menu or right click on the word, and have a side bar pop up with information about the word. It currently is working outside of our Apps for Education domain when you create a new document, and should hopefully be rolling into our Apps for Edu in the next couple of weeks. The video below gives an overview. UPDATE: After posting this, Kyle Pace shared with me the document he put together on the new features. In it, he points out that you can also change the search filter to include only images that have been Creative Commons licensed, along with other detailed features. Thanks for the "heads up," Kyle!