Edina Digital Age Learning

For the last 3 years I've had the pleasure of consulting with South View Middle School Language Arts teacher, Jennifer Buckley on her student Apathy project . This year, her teaching partner Eli Mickelson joined her in collaborating on the project along with Art teacher, John Kraus and Project Lead the Way teacher Jason Carr . Over the next 4 days, students will be sharing their presentations. This morning, I will stream live, so that students that collaborated with elementary classrooms on their project can share their presentations with the classrooms. I'm using Vokle for the first time and the stream will be live here. The students begin by reading stories that have apathy as a theme. Then they gather in groups and look for places they see apathy in the world around them. They gather data, brainstorm solutions, contact stakeholders and leaders and invite them to view their presentation on solutions. Students were given options on the tools that they used . This year stud...

In this session, Monika Hardy and students from Loveland , Colorado shared a new learning opportunity that they have been exploring called " Innovation Lab ". Students are designing courses and modules based on their passions, and creating peer learning opportunities for others. One student named Aimee shared how her teacher suggested setting up a Website for students to study for an AP test. Aimee asked if instead she could post it to Students 2.0 so that others around the world could benefit and prepare for the test. The teacher agreed, and A student named, Chase shared projects he has been working on, including student led tutorials, such as translating adult language into kid/student language by posting to Youtube and Voicethread . Here is an example of a video he created . Another student created her own audio files for students including her own "Rosetta Stone" for German, allowing students to learn the language from another student. Morgan will be studying...

In the afternoon session, I attended a session on Project Based Learning (PBL) by John Mergendoller , Executive Director of The Buck Institute for Education . I have used some of the Institute's materials when conducting PBL workshops, so I was interested in what they had to say. Dr. Mergendoller presented the example of "The Monkey Project", a simulation where a school board has to decide whether to teach Evolution, Intelligent Design, or both in their curriculum. Students research both sides of the issue, and overcome their personal opinions to develop their project. Teachers in the example facilitated and managed the process, where students were placed into teams and created a script of a "Mock School Board Hearing." After watching a video similar to the one above, Mergendoller had participants "Think/Pair/Share and discuss whether we thought this was a good project. The project was approximately 6 weeks, and was a rather large undertaking. For some ...

Recently teachers in my One to One Learning Community of Practice presented lessons they had created to incorporate ubiquitous computing. I streamed the session on Mogulus , and Mike Dronen , the Technology Coordinator from Stillwater, Minnesota listened in. After all had presented, he asked via the chat: "Do any of these lessons require one to one access?" After some reflection, we thought that only one would not be possible without 1:1 access. The others could be done in a lab, or without each student needing access to a computer. The goal of the cohort was to create an integrated lesson or unit that took advantage of One to One access. Our plan is to use these lessons with students in the fall. While doing research on one to one lessons, we found information, developed by Ruben Puentedura outlining levels of technology integration. While Dronen's question was comparing a lesson in a one to one environment vs. a lesson in a classroom without one to one, I think the ch...

Here are some key takeaways I've had here at Educon in no particular order: There are no public "AP intensive schools" that have moved to Project Based/Student Centered Learning because as Gary Stager said, "AP is the antithesis of a Project based Student centered curriculum. There are some private schools who have recognized that they were turning out students who were good at the Knowledge level but not beyond, and have made the switch, like the Cincinnati Country Day School. There are many programs out their that are working, but replication and scalability are not easy-human capital. The key to creating successful projects is to develop authentic Essential Questions that are standards based. Chris Lehmann is a tremendous educator, and tremendous host! The teaching staff at SLA are fantastic! And their pretty young too!!! There is a huge disconnect between what we believe education should be about and what it is about. Change will not be easy, but worth fighting...

Brad Latimer, Kenneth Rochester and Caitlin Latimer talked about benchmark projects that they have used in their mathematics curriculum. Note: This site has all of the sessions and streaming channels can be seen here . Here are the project discriptions Latimer - Each kid picked a city and had to get data on temperature and sunset times. Then they needed to apply transformations to sin and cosin functions to match their Requirements Graphs w/ functions and data Process guide Concept map tied to the rubric. Some students made brochure, some could create a presentation, etc... Alison, a student who's project was featured took data and put it in Excel, then into Geo-Sketchpad, and used "Pages" in iWork to create the brochure. She wanted a print out that people could take with them and not need a computer. What went well: Students grabbed a hold of it and were engaged. (In student journal entries), Open ended in how they would present the material, 5 core values were met very ...

Taking the advice of David Jakes , and given that all of the sessions are being streamed and archived here , I skipped Gary Stager's session on "The Best Education Ideas in the World" and attended this session by SLA Teachers Larissa Pahomov (English), Caitlin Thompson (Math) and Rosalind Echols (Physics). They were 3 of 9 new teachers this year. They were all fairly young, and had experience teaching with "Teach for America" and two taught in foreign countries. This was my experience as a "student" in the classroom. Feature of SLA - Advisory Wednesday Meetings Joint Responsibility for Planning School Curriculum Planning w/ Understanding By Design Collaboration (Internal, External) Caitlin (Math) shared her experience with collaboration within her department. All teach the same block, so they have 12 blocks a week free for planning. No department head...All co-teach a class. (Same class-more like a job share) Geometry with Brad Latimer -similar ...

During the discussion, the following comments were made: Big Picture Schools and SLA are examples of schools using Project Based Learning and Inquiry effectively. Foundation and Support are the key Right now the battle is between Project Based vs. Standards Based-My comment: Shouldn't projects be based on the standards? Stager: "NCLB was created by man, it can be undone by man!" Participant: "NCLB is not a bad thing, the execution is bad." "Most who bash it haven't read it" "9% of child's time from 0-18 is spent in a classroom" Charischak: "NCTM doesn't have computers at their conference anymore." David Thornburg mentioned this software developed by NASA for math. Thornburg: "I did read all of NCLB and found some good chuckles." ,"Within a year, more than half of AP test takers must be above average", Unfunded mandates: Technology, "What got funded was the cheap stuff: Measure, measure, measure....