Conduit Mobile: Turn any website/blog/wiki into an app for any mobile device!
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Integrating technology in the classroom
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It’s here, it’s here! The November issue of Project PLN is finally finished (thanks to many of you!) and ready to share.
We are excited about the November issue of Project PLN because it is full of feel-good stories about the amazing things that are happening in schools around the world. We have a great collection of stories that will have you inspired and thankful to be a part of this thing we call education. Take a look at the stories in the new issue, leave a comment for those who contributed and feel free to share your own stories on Twitter using the hash tag #SchoolDidaGoodThing
At Anastasis, we had a few students share what good things they saw happening at school, it is always great to have the kids perspective! Be sure to check out that post in Project PLN this month!
For the December Issue, we want to do something AWESOME. We want to hear from students from across this country and around the world. Educators, politicians, parents and many more have been doing a lot of talking about what schools should look like to best serve students. Well, we had the crazy idea of actually asking the students what they would want their school to look like if they could design it! These can be group projects or a collection of smaller projects. If you send it, we will publish it. I did this project with students a few years ago and it was really neat. Amazing things happen when you ask for student input!
Using this Google Doc, please sign up for the grade level you teach and have your students draw, write, film, animate, etc what they want in their dream school. In all, we would like to have 13 posts representing K-12.
We would love to have all submissions by Monday December 19 so we can put them up for Tuesday December 20th before the Holidays get the best of us.
You may be wondering (or not) where the daily posts have been lately. Believe me, it isn’t for lack of tools to share! The slowness here is directly related to the time I am spending starting a school…as it turns out it is quite a bit of work! 😉 If you are a reader of all of my blogs, you have already seen this one, but for those of you who only follow me here, I thought I would give you a peek into the school I started this year.
Below, I share a picture of an incredible morning we had at Anastasis Academy where we welcomed singer/song writer Matthew West to join us for our morning devotion…we had NO idea it would result in the incredible private concert that it did. What an enormous blessing to have Matthew share his time, creativity and passion with us. Check out video of the morning on our school blog Stand Again.
|Kelly Tenkely|
It’s a pretty incredible thing to see dreams come to fruition.
For me it started with an obsession and passion for creating rich learning environments where every student was recognized as an individual. In that first post I wrote:
“I have a dreams of education. I have dreams of the way that schools should look. I have dreams of kids who find their passions. I have dreams of schools as rich learning centers.”
I had dreams of stripping the “vanilla” away so that passions could emerge.
Dreams of ditching that boxed curriculum that we call an education and watching the factory model fade into the rear-view mirror.
Dreams of ending the practice of viewing teachers (and students) as expendables.
I had dreams of schools that were beautiful, that were designed with students in mind.
Dreams that education would stop looking so much like the McRib.
Dreams of breaking free of the box, of valuing students and teachers, of using the right tools, of a school where a student’s inner da Vinci can break through, of a school that customizes learning.
I shared dreams of more fabulous failures.
The dreams started trickling into reality in March of this year (2011). In March I started getting some hints that these dreams weren’t really all that far-fetched. By May I had officially started a school. In August we opened the doors to Anastasis Academy with our first 50 students in 1st through 8th grade and had hired a dream team of 5 truly incredible teachers to lead them. In four short months we went from dreams to reality.
At Anastasis Academy, we lease space from a church building throughout the week. We have our own wing with classrooms, a playground, a gym and a kitchen. All of our furniture is on wheels. This makes it easy to adjust space daily based on needs, it is also a necessity since we use shared space. Twice a week we move all of our belongings across the hall into a storage room (if I’m honest, this is the part we could do without!). We can’t complain about the space. It is pretty incredible!
You will notice that we don’t have rows of desks. No teacher’s desk either. We have space that kids can move in. Corners to hide in, stages to act on, floors to spread out on, cars to read in. We are learning how to learn together, learning how to respect other children’s space and needs, learning how to discipline ourselves when we need to, learning how to work collaboratively, we are learning to be the best us.
You won’t see a worksheet at Anastasis. We use iPads. That isn’t to say that we ONLY use iPads, in fact, you’ll often see us building, cutting, pasting, writing on a whiteboard/chalkboard and even paper. We do a lot of blogging, a lot of reflecting, a lot of Evernotting, a lot of cinematography, a lot of discussing.
Every morning we start with a 15 minute walk outside together…as a community. We invite parents and siblings to be a part of our morning walk. Occasionally we have the dogs join in on the fun. After the walk we come inside as a whole-school for a time of devotions. Again, this is a time for us to build community, to foster the culture we want for our school. Families are invited to join us every morning. We always have at least one family and, many times, multiples. We pray with each other and for each other. We have hard conversations and funny conversations. We think together and challenge each other.
Our inquiry block is a time for hands-on transdisciplinary learning. This is my VERY favorite time to walk through classrooms. It is incredible to see the joy in discovery. It is incredible to have a second grade student with dyslexia discover an app to make stop motion animations, teach himself how to use it and proceed to stand up before 7th and 8th grade students to explain how stop motion works. I wish I could bring you all through the building during this time. Every time we have a visitor the students pause long enough to describe what they are doing, the learning that is happening. I often have to pick my jaw up off the floor. These kids are amazing.
We have no curriculum. At all. Zip. What did we do instead? We hired the very BEST teachers we could find. We gave them a base level of skills that we wanted students to have- an outline if you will. We used the Common Core Standards as our baseline. We don’t use the standards like most schools do. We use them to make sure that our students have the building blocks and foundations of learning in place. And then we let our students and teachers GO. The standards are not a weight we are tied to, they are the underpinnings that make it possible for us to soar and take our learning anywhere. When you look at the Common Core standards they are pretty underwhelming. I’m glad they are! They provide us with just enough momentum to propel us forward and then off we go on a journey of learning! We also have our big inquiry questions in place. From there, we go where the learning takes us, bunny trails and all. It is pretty fantastic. Today one of our primary students came out to see me and said, “Look at this boat I found in this new library book. Can I try to make it?” My answer: “Absolutely! What materials do we need?” Together we made a list of all the materials I needed to pull together for him. Tomorrow he will build that boat he is fascinated with and find out if it works the way he has planned. That is learning! Tell me what boxed curriculum allows time for that to happen? None. That is why we don’t have it.
In the afternoons we have more “content” area subjects (i.e. math and language arts). In the primary grades this means students building the skills they need to support their inquiry. In the intermediate grades this means honing those skills for better communication and more thorough inquiry. Again, we don’t work from a boxed curriculum. We find the lessons, approaches, and materials that work for the individual student. Sometimes this means working with manipulatives, sometimes it means exploring measurement outside, and sometimes it means using an app. It changes daily based on the needs of the students.
We have mixed age level classrooms. We do this for a lot of reasons. Most importantly, it is good for older and younger students to work together and learn from each other; it is vital that a child be able to work at their developmental level and progress as they are ready to; and it deepens inquiry when students with different perspectives work together.
Once every five weeks we invite the parents to join us for Parent University. This is a time for us to help parents understand this new way to do school. Detox, if you will. It is a time for us to show parents what best practices in education look like, why grades aren’t all they are cracked up to be, why play is important. It is a time for us to think and laugh together. It is a time to get questions answered.
Also every five weeks, we hold a “Meeting of the Minds”. This is a parent/teacher/student conference where we all get together and set our road map for the next 5 weeks. Students write goals with the help of their teacher. They have ownership over what they have done the last 5 weeks and tell mom and dad what they have planned for upcoming 5 weeks.
Every Friday we have a learning excursion or an opportunity for an “Anastasis Serves”. Learning excursions are field trips all over the place that help students start to recognize that learning doesn’t just happen when we are at school. Learning happens everywhere we are and, if we are paying attention, all the time. Anastasis Serves is a time for our students to give back to the global community. Sometimes this is a door-to-door scavenger hunt for donations, sometimes this is learning about orphans around the world, or packaging cookies and letters to send to our troops.
We don’t do grades, we do assessment all day every day while we learn. We don’t do homework, we pursue our families and passions at home. We don’t do worksheets, we do interesting (sometimes frustrating) work. We don’t do boxed curriculum, we do on-demand learning.
We do mistakes. We do community. We do collaboration. We do messy. We do play. We do fun. We do technology. We do learning.
How do we do all this? We have a 12 to 1 student teacher ratio (or less). We have incredible students, parents and teachers. We have stinking smart board members who are invested in our success and trust our judgement calls. We set our tuition at $8,000 (per pupil spending in our district) to show that even though we are private, this can be done in the public schools. We started with nothing…well almost nothing, we had dreams. There was no capital raised, no fund-raisers, no huge donation. We started the beginning of the year at $0 and put blood, sweat and tears into it.
This is not to say that we have it all figured out, that all of our students are perfect, that all of our staff or families are perfect. We are perfectly imperfect as every school is. We have days when the kids are BOUNCING off the walls, we have disagreements, tired teachers, stressed parents, a founder who has occasional melt downs (that would be me), students who need extra love and support, tight budgets, parents who demand different, scuffles, sniffles and band-aids…lots of band-aids. There is nowhere else I would rather be. No other group of people I would rather work with. No other students whose germs I would rather share. This is my dream.
There are moments throughout the day when I am stopped in my tracks by the realization-this is my dream.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Zimmer Twins School in your classroom!
Last week at this time I was getting ready for my Reform Symposium Keynote. It was fun to share with everyone but what I really enjoyed about the weekend was learning from everyone else! The Reform Symposium recordings are now live! To keep that learning going I’m going to do a 27 days of professional development series.
For the next 27 days in addition to sharing a tech tool, I’m also going to share one of the Reform Symposium sessions. Last weekend was such an incredible time of learning and sharing that I want to keep the momentum going. It is also a GREAT excuse for me to attend all of the sessions I missed out on during the conference.
If you missed my keynote last week about how a blog post and a Twitter conversation started a school, you can view it here. This is a link to the Elluminate session (a Java download).
Below are the slides I used in my Keynote. For those who asked, I made the slides using Apple’s Keynote. I just drew a timeline, inserted some pictures, text and voila- timeline!
Yesterday, I held a tweetup at a local coffee shop to teach teachers about Twitter using…paper! The idea was to give teachers, of varying tech levels, a concrete way to learn the ins and outs of Twitter before actually jumping in with the technology. I wanted teachers to really understand the social nature of Twitter before worrying about the technical aspects.
It was a huge success! Our biggest problem of the day was the noise of ice being crushed for smoothies, if you have ever run a tech training this is pretty small bananas!
You can read (and watch) about how I planned for this Tweetup here. As teachers arrived, I handed them a paper Twitter packet. In the packet they found a half sheet screen shot of a Twitter wall with explanation call outs of important features, a name tag with their @ Twitter name, a password card for their classroom twitter account, an envelope with “DM” printed on the front, a stack of sticky notes with their Twitter handle on it, and a pen. I created a paper Twitter wall using that huge sticky note chart paper and stuck it to the wall of the coffee shop. After explaining how paper tweeting would work and giving them a run down of some of the Twitter lingo (wall, follow, DM, hash tag, RT, @ reply), I let them start “tweeting”. #edchat was going on at the same time. I knew that these teachers wouldn’t be ready to jump into that conversation online in their first venture out into the Twitter world, so I took the conversation to them in our paper tweeting. I gave the teachers the same topic and invited them to paper tweet responses. They wrote out a response and stuck it to one of the paper Twitter walls. I read the tweets out loud as they came in so that the teachers could write some @ replies. Everyone seemed to love passing private notes back and forth using the DM envelopes.
It was a fun time of socializing and I think everyone grasped the power of Twitter as a communication tool. At the end of the session I let them login to their actual Twitter accounts and practice sending a few tweets. This worked out really well because they already had lists to follow that I created for them and all of their accounts are already following each other. They had a built-in PLN to work with as soon as they logged on. This helped a lot! Today teachers will be taking Twitter into their classrooms and using it with students.
Result of the paper tweetup: success!
I’m currently working with an elementary and middle school to roll out a school wide social media campaign. I have had a lot of questions about this so I thought I would make a video sharing how that decision was made and how we are approaching it. Yes, I did film this video today…although the calendar says spring, Colorado woke up to SNOW this morning-hence the furry hooded sweater. 🙂
If you don’t have time to watch the video, here are the highlights:
Tomorrow I am holding a Tweetup. I BEGGED that this not look like typical tech training. You know the kind…tired teachers crammed in the computer lab at the end of the day to learn a new tool. Been there, done that. Unless you are a mega tech geek like me, you just really don’t appreciate those kind of trainings! I was afraid if we approached this training the way we approach all other trainings, teachers would instantly have to get past that barrier. Instead, we are meeting at a local coffee shop after school. I sent out fun invitations and made sure teachers knew that this was a SOCIAL event. After all, we are talking social media!
Because I know this staff well (I worked with them for 7 years, these are my friends!), I also have the benefit of knowing how comfortable they are with technology. I suspect that they are pretty typical of school staffs everywhere. There are some who are very comfortable with new technologies, and some who have trouble filling out a login form on their own. I didn’t want technology to be a barrier for those who aren’t comfortable with it, so I decided to steal an idea from my friend @mcteach. She does a paper blogging project with her students where they learn to blog and comment using paper before technology even enters the picture. I LOVED the idea and thought it could be adapted for my Twitter Tweetup. I made a video describing my paper tweeting method below.
Again, if you don’t have time for the video, here are the highlights:
I think tomorrow will be fun, I’ll be sure to take some pictures and share them! If you missed them the first time around, here is a link to the Twitter posters that I created for the classrooms.
What it is: Enter the Group is a fabulous online tool that makes it simple to work with, and organize, groups online. The tool has similar functionalities to Wiggio. Enter the Group includes shared calendars, site email, file sharing, instant chat and message boards, the ability to create private groups and classrooms, tasks and assignments, polls, blogging, Twitter, and question/answer forum, and best of all: it is totally free! Enter the Group has some really nice classroom features that other online group management sites like Wiggio don’t have. The built in blog feature is useful for the classroom setting, it provides students with a place to reflect that can be set as “private” so that it is a closed network for your classroom or school. This is especially helpful in schools where administration and the school community is hesitant to enter the world of blogging! Enter the Group Classrooms provides a virtual classroom space that can act as an extension of the physical classroom. Teachers and students can interact, keep track of due dates and special events, share files, post messages, and more. Students can take their learning with them anywhere and access the resources they need anytime. Enter the Group is easy to use and has really helpful tips and video guidance throughout the tool. No matter what your technology ability level is, Enter the Group has made it easy to get started.
My favorite thing about Enter the Group? They understand that the classroom is about learning, from the classroom page: “What do we do in classrooms? Simple answer is we learn. The longer answer is we; listen, ask questions, start debates, get group feedback, work on assignments, take tests and exams, present our work and perhaps many other things I haven’t thought of as well. Should all these things stop once the bell sounds and the students walk out the door? We all know the answer is no.” Enter the Group isn’t about the technology, but about the learning opportunities that it enables.
How to integrate Enter the Group into the classroom: Enter the Group is a way to extend learning beyond the walls of your classroom. Use it to extend conversations, debates, and offer support through online discussion; help students (and parents) keep track of assignments and classroom events, keep track of and share files so students who are absent are never left behind, to collect shared resources and information (a kind of “digital textbook” that you create for/with your students); to expand on class topics with video; and to create a collaborative learning environment. Students can use Enter the Group to plan and organize projects that they are working on in groups, providing a virtual meeting space outside of the classroom to collaborate. Enter the Group is perfect for students who are out with an illness or to continue learning opportunities when pandemic illness or bad weather keeps us from the physical classroom (anyone had SNOW problems this year? 🙂 ) Enter the Group provides a platform where students can continue learning and collaborating from any Internet-connected computer.
Do you have students collaborating with another class in another state? Another country? Enter the Group is a great place for students to work together, discuss, debate, and share. The ability to create a private network adds a layer of security and manageability to the online group.
Enter the Group also makes a great platform for working with colleagues and for professional development. Share important dates, files, and reflections within the group. Enter the Group is a nice way to gather and share resources from one centralized location making it easy to add to, and grow, year after year. No more, “remember that great lesson we used last year? What was that site/resource again?” (I cannot tell you how many times I have had THAT conversation!)
Tips: Enter the Group provides a few options for sign-up. Teachers, parents, and students can sign up with an email address (don’t forget to use tempinbox.com or mailinaitor.com for temporary inboxes for students who don’t have an email account), Twitter, or Facebook. It would be nice if Enter the Group had a feature like Wiggio where group members could join without registering-this is really helpful in elementary classrooms.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Enter the Group in your classroom
What it is: On January 11, 2011 Google will be launching Google Science Fair. Google has partnered with NASA, CERN, National Geographic, Scientific American, and LEGO group to create a new global competition. There isn’t much information about the logistics of the science fair just yet, but right now you can sign up for fun and free resource kits for your classroom or school and a reminder notification when the Google Science Fair registration opens. The kit comes with bookmarks, stickers, posters, and more.
How to integrate Google Science Fair into your curriculum: Even though there aren’t many details about what the Google Science Fair will look like yet, rest assured with the partners involved it is sure to be an incredible learning experience. This is a global competition and should have ample opportunity for your students to connect with and learn from others around the world.
Tips: Sign up today to receive the Science Fair kit and receive a reminder when registration is open.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Google Science Fair your classroom!
It is here! The December issue of #ProjectPLN is ready to share. In this issue we asked everyone to share their favorite web tools. The resulting collection is great! It is always fun to see what tools others couldn’t live without and how they use them to improve learning in their classrooms.
As a side note congratulations to my partner in crime Nick Provenzano (@thenerdyteacher) who will be presenting 2 poster sessions at ISTE 11, one of them being a session about #ProjectPLN! Congratulations Nick, very excited for you!
projectpln10 – Project PLN Issue 4
Create Your OpenZine
Don’t forget about my favorites…you can find them on my Web 2.0 Advent Calendar. (Hint, the bird is your ticket back to the home page 🙂 )