Sunday, September 20, 2015

Digital Playground ~ Creation Apps

The iTeachers at Powdersville Elementary and I have decided to host a Digital Playground session with a different theme for each month. Our goal for these sessions is to provide teachers with a fun way to explore new apps for the classroom and to encourage collaboration & sharing between grade levels.

For this month, each of us selected a creation app and created a station activity for the teachers. I chose to share Tellagami and My Talking Avatar, which can both be used by students to create a talking avatar to describe an image of something they've created or learned about. Book Creator, Puppet Edu, Popplet, and Thinglink were the other app selections for this month.



Teacher feedback from this session was excellent. They liked that the session was "self-paced," allowing them to move from station to station at any time. One of the teachers commented, "I enjoyed the opportunity to talk with other teachers about these apps as we were exploring." Several others made comments about the session being "informative" and "fun."

Thank you so much to Melissa Wilcox, Brenna Wilkie, Rachel Wayne, and Melissa Tollison for working together to make this a great learning opportunity for our teachers! Thanks also to Principal Brad Moore for supporting this event and providing drinks & snacks.


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Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Finding Direction

I started this month by kicking off a new monthly "Transform" PD series for teachers at each of the schools I serve this year. My goal for this monthly professional development series is to offer teachers an opportunity to dig deeper into the tech tools they have been discovering and to provide the necessary support for teachers to begin transforming instruction. The schedule at my schools will allow me to meet with groups of fewer than 10 teachers throughout the day during teacher planning. To start each month, I will be asking my teachers what they want to learn, need to learn, and wish to accomplish during our time together.

September's Transform Session, "Finding Direction" was a great way for me to lay the foundation for future sessions and get to learn more about the teachers I serve. 



Prior to this session, I created a Google Classroom for each of my five schools and invited teachers to join the class. By using Google Classroom as a launching pad for my professional development, I am able to stay organized and share resources, while also giving teachers an opportunity to experience the app from a student perspective.

During the session, I introduced teachers to Waze, a navigation app for their personal use. Though the app is similar to Google Maps, it differs in one very important way... Waze connects drivers with others using the app. After a quick explanation of how the app works, I related it to teaching: The most effective educators know where they are and have a goal for where they plan to go with instruction, while also recognizing the importance of collaborating with other teachers. The experiences of others in their building, in our school district, and around the world (using Twitter) offer valuable insights and information about the road ahead.

Next, I created an activity that allowed teachers to tap into their creativity while reviewing some basic iPad skills. This activity was built around the idea that the Waze app needs to know 3 things in order to work: who you are, where you are, and where you want to go. (For more information, see Google Slides above.) Teachers used Google Classroom to submit a PicCollage, and Answer Garden was used to collect adjectives for their "Destination."






To close each session, I reminded teachers that our next session will be based around their ideas for their own classroom and encouraged them to bring ideas, interests, and questions. Teachers also completed a Google Form to provide me with useful feedback, and I was so excited about their enthusiastic responses!

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Friday, September 4, 2015

September Updates

It has been a wild first few weeks of school, as our team has been working hard to get iPads set up and distributed to the students! Though we have had our share of bumps in the road, I feel like we are in far better shape this year than we were at this same point in 2014. We still have a way to go before the process is as smooth as we would like it to be, but I feel like things are headed in the right direction. It's so exciting to see students and teachers using the devices as a regular part of instruction already!

In order to share some updates and resources with all of my teachers, I created the Thinglink below:

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