Edina Digital Age Learning

In this session at the Superhero conference , participants shared a 15 minute session on a topic.  Flipping with Glogster Rojanne Brown shared her ideas about Flipping the classroom with GlogsterEdu . Here is a link to her resources. This provides a different way for students to share information. With the paid version, teachers can manage student accounts. Breaking the Barrier of Space and Time Siri Anderson who is the Director of Online Learning at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, talked about how to transform their practice. Here is the link to her presentation. Right now, colleges are really worried about COWS! MOOCS! Here are her notes: Breaking the Barrier of Space and Time Siri Anderson, St. Catherine University There is a lot of concern about MOOC’s right now in higher ed. Coursara, Udacity, EDX, MIT Open Courses in higher ed. Coursara, Udacity, EDX, MIT Open Courses Can we use the acronym RATS = Replacement - Amplification - Trans...

Tonight while reflecting on the Superhero Conference, I saw this tweet from Carolyn Fruin : Thinglink is a site where you can upload an image or grab one off of Facebook , Flickr or another Website. I decided to test it out to see what it was like. I grabbed a photo from our family vacation this summer and went to work, adding tags to the image, linking to sites and resources or to other photos I had taken. Roll your mouse over it to view the "Hotspots," that can be customized and include links. I can see this as a tool for digital storytelling, or reflection with students. It's fairly easy to use, and I like it's embedding qualities, thought I would first make the image no wider than 640 pixels to be sure it is viewable.

Molly Schroeder at Superhero 12 My colleague, Molly Schroede r led this session on  "What Will Learning Look Like in 2017?" We began attempting to individually answer questions on the Google Doc about what learning might look like . In her experience as a Google Certified Teacher, she has visited many Google offices, and has seen many different cool work environments. In fact, at Google, they recognize that work does not have to always happen at "your desk." She recently had the opportunity to visit Albany Senior High School in Auckland, New Zealand. The school opened recently  with the philosophy that learning is an active 2-way process. Learning spaces today need to be flexible. We saw that here at the conference, where people gathered to share ideas. Albany has windows and spaces that connect the inside to the outside community.  The space is open and shared. They don't have bells, because they don't want to signify that learning has a beginni...

The focus of this breakout session at the Superhero Conference was to look at presentations and how we can make them better. It was one of the more popular sessions at last year's event, and I wanted to be sure to see it!  John UnruhFriesen shared how PowerPoint bullets are all our students see. Following the Explore...Explain model of Ramsey Mussalam's Keynote , he began by having us begin by creating our own presentation via Google Docs. Here is my finished model: In Google Presentation now, when searching for images to include, you can now see only images that have been labeled for reuse! Always size from the corner. Filling the entire screen is better! Malcolm Gladwell in Blink asks, "How many seconds does it take for a student to judge your effectiveness?" Gladwell says, "10!" When we see something good right away, that sets the mood for the way things will go in the rest of the time. How many bullets do we see in meetings? We do the ...

The Superhero 12 Conference kicked off with Ramsey Musallam , a Chemistry teacher from San Fransisco, California, who is a co-host of " Infinite Thinking Machine ." The title of his talk was "Pseudo Teaching", and began by talking about "Michael Scott," who THINKS he's a great manager. Pseudo Teaching was defined by Frank Noschese and John Burke to describe lessons and pedagogy that you think are great, but really aren't. Musallam thinks Michael Scott is a great metaphor for this. He shared his background, going through pre-Med at UC-Davis, and how he loved explaining things to people as a tutor. As a Chemistry tutor, he decided he needed to be able to show students how to "blow stuff up!" One of student quotes: I still have no idea how to balance a reaction, but I loved watching you blow @#!$& up! He thought engaging and entertaining were the only keys to good teaching. It was when he thought about "Mr. Mia...

I attended the Education Minnesota Conference on October 18, mostly to hear Will Richardson and Diane Ravitch . It was good to also connect with fellow educators at the conference, and it was really cool to see Minnesota Teacher of the Year, Jackie Roehl encourage educators to reflect on their practice and apply for the Teacher of the Year program . After talks by Jackie and elected representatives, Ravitch spoke to the crowd about the myths currently driving the education reform movement, and the real motivation behind several initiatives. I decided to use Storify to pull together some of the pertenant tweets and articles shared while she was speaking. I can see this as a great way for students and staff to aggregate information. I was working quickly, and realize there may be many duplicate retweets. I first tried the regular format but quickly found that it was way too much scrolling, so I opted to use their Slideshow format to embed. [ View the story "Education Minnesot...

The following is a guest post from South View Middle School Government Teacher, Claude Sigmund . Claude needed a way to present and chat with his AP Government students outside of class, and we decided it was the perfect time to use WebEx , a video conferencing tool that we had recently purchased. Up until this time, we had only used it to present professional development to staff , but we thought there would be times, especially at the secondary level, where teachers could use it for help sessions with students outside of the school day. I like that the teacher can present, include video of themselves, have a backchannel chat as well as audio and video with the students, AND it all can be recorded for playback if students couldn't attend. Here are Claude's thoughts about the experience.  My teaching time was cut short.  With a retreat, NWEA MAP testing and the Education Minnesota Conference,  I was only going to see my kids 2 times in three weeks.  This is ...

Trying the Blogger iPad app for this post. I still think it's clunky, but wanted to give myself the experience. Here is a synopsis of the luncheon keynote yesterday at MEMO. For blogging, I still like my laptop. The MEMO Pre-Conference Luncheon Keynote was from Laurie Conzemius, She started by talking about NECC 2001, as a new user. (I was there) She shared her tips for getting to this great PD Opportunity. I decided Tips: 1. Volunteers get a reduced rate. 2. Planning committee members get free access. 3. It's in the summer,so no need for sub 4. Free vendor meals The biggest reason is Professional Development. Osseo will be offering ISTE aligned tech integration this January.

Kristin Daniels, Technology Integration Specialist for Stillwater Schools presented the keynote presentation at the MEMO Pre-Conference on " Personal Portable Learning ." The strands today included BYOD, Flipped Learning, 1:1 and iPads.  Here experience began at the elementary level in Stillwater looking at the learning experience the students were having. They began implementing a Flipped Classroom pilot , where a group of 6 teachers began creating video lecture content and having students watch that at home. She and her colleague, Wayne Feller thought about "How do we want to spend our time together with teachers?" They developed a Flipped Professional Development model where the staff could view video of the "how to," and then spend face to face time looking at the best way to implement that in their classroom. She shared stories from the "Learning Culture" that has been impacted by the Flipped pilot. After each video, they included a...

Recently, I was interviewed on "Beyond the Badge," a program produced by the City of Edina. Police Liason Officer, Aaron White and I visited on what parents can do to get more informed about Cyberbullying. Here are some additional resources to help parents become informed about this important issue: Parenting in the Digital Age Presentation Parent's Guide to 21st Century Learning ThinkB4U -Great site for parents interested in learning more about Digital Literacy. Parent Further - A Search Institute Site for Families Kids and Tech-Parenting Tips for the Digital Age Facebook Terms of Service  Facebook Tools for Parents and Educators Common Sense Media-Facebook for Parents

Dr. Gerry Swan discussing rigor in assessment This week, I have been participating in a workshop with our administrators on developing a Standards Based Report Card for Minnesota. Dr Lee Ann Jung, Dr. Gerry Swan, & Dr. Thomas Guskey are leading us through three days of training using a model they developed in Kentucky. Here are the shared notes our group put together on all of the sessions thus far. Here are some of key take-aways thus far: 1.  The Kentucky Model 1st State to adopt Common Core No parents on development Gave parents the option of both, they picked Standards Based 3 the first year, 10 the second, now 17 using it (177 total) Now, Department of Ed is funding and could be state wide in 2-3 years 2.  This is the FOUNDATION-3 Types of Grading Criteria Grading and Reporting should ALWAYS be done in reference to LEARNING CRITERIA, never “on the curve.” Grade on what they learned, not in how they did in relation to others. Why would I h...