Innovative Education in Vermont
Exploring innovative, personalized, student-centered school change
Here’s a great way to dip your toes in the digital credentialing waters: DIY.org. What Is It? Geared for kids 8 and up, DIY.org features dozens of digital badges heavily geared towards doing and making. To earn a badge, students choose to complete 2 or 3 challenges from an array of 7 or 8, and …
Tarrant Institute professional development coordinator Susan Hennessey discusses the current and future possibilities of digital badging, e-portfolios and alternative credentialing, with such tools as Badgestack and BadgeOS.
Today on the show, we’re going to talk about The End of Average: How to Succeed in a World That Values Sameness, by Todd Rose. We’ll be joined by Emily Gilmore, who teaches world history at South Burlington High School, in South Burlington Vermont. But first, a few words of background for today’s show. In …
The great big myth that persists with any hands-on, project or inquiry-based approach? That teachers simply “turn students loose” on a project, and sit back and drink tea. The truth couldn’t be more different. Teaching becomes more personal, more centered on students’ needs, and interests. Less tea, more action. What does this look like? It …
Continue reading “Ch 6: Scaffolding for Equitable, Deeper Learning”
The why and how of personalization An inquiry question forms the backbone of action research in the classroom. It guides the full shape of the research to come, and forms a foundation for the educator and students to build ongoing research. Learning Lab VT is a program with action research at its heart — action …
Thank you for joining us for another episode of #vted Reads. This time we will be discussing The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact. We’ll look for ways to make classroom moments more powerful, explore opportunities to raise the stakes for your students, and visit the popsicle hotline. Oh, and we’ll talk …
Continue reading “#vted Reads: The Power of Moments, with Rachel Mark”
Noah Hurlburt Noah Hurlburt teaches 7th & 8th grade science at Rutland Town School, in Rutland VT. noah.hurlburt@grcsu.org Inquiry question: “How can a focus on Digital Badging for transferable skills increase student engagement and create a common language in the PLP process?” Learning Lab reflections:
Inquiry Question: How might personalization through self-reflection, self-assessment, and flexible grouping and scheduling across grades 3 and 4 at Proctor Elementary School positively impact student engagement and achievement? After our overnight retreat with my Learning Lab colleagues and some discussion about the fear of sharing our work when it doesn’t produce the results we …
To be honest, there has been an even split of successes and failures to date. Let’s take a look shall we? So, reflection time. Trying to avoid the TLDR (too long, didn’t read) moment, sooooo, to change it up a little, I’ll let the images set the stage. Bright spots: I tend to be pretty …
Personalizing PE In this era of personalized learning, it’s not just the jocks that find P.E. enjoyable. At Crossett Brook Middle School and Shelburne Community School, students employ cool technology, develop creative projects, and pursue personal interests and goals while developing autonomy, healthy habits, and deep understandings.
Badging growth toward goals’ attainment A small group of these 6th grades at Peoples Academy wondered how they could help their peers be more engaged in the school’s Opportunity Time, time devoted to goal-setting and exploring student interests, so they took on the challenge of designing a digital badging system to incentive their peers.
Realizing the promise of micro-credentialing As teachers and students grapple with how to implement proficiency-based assessment, flexible pathways and personalized learning, what can we learn from digital badge eco-systems? What’s been tried? What’s worked? And what do we need to think about as we implement micro-credentialing to help us grapple, not just with the requirements …
Continue reading “Digital badges as evidence of flexible pathways”
Shifting the way we manage time to personalize learning in a blended space In my former professional life, I had the pleasure and the challenge of managing a large high school library media center. An irony of the job, one that made me smile and cringe, was the volume of the bell which rang every …
What can you do with an LMS? LMS stands for Learning Management System. An LMS is an application for planning, delivering, managing, and assessing a learning process. Likely, your school or district will choose which commercial LMS package to deploy (Canvas, Haiku, Schoology and Google Classroom are a few), but how you use it is entirely up to you.
Embed yourself in your video lesson MoveNote lets you create screencasts where you appear alongside the material, making how to screencast a lot more dynamic for students and educators. Flipped classroom? Blended learning? Student presentations? Gallery walks? Support for students with disabilities? Let’s look at some of the possibilities, features and how to get up and …
What are some mechanisms for keeping track of digital credentials? As we work with schools who are piloting digital badge programs on the BadgeOS platform, we need to start thinking through what some options are for students to store, keep track of, and display the digital credentials they earn. What does it look like to …
Music City learns a thing or two about Vermont ed tech Half of the Tarrant Institute staff and a special guest headed to Nashville last week to present at the Association for Middle Level Education Annual Conference. We set out to share with middle grades educators from around the world the incredible, tech-rich teaching happening in Vermont schools. As we always …
Continue reading “Innovative learning shared at Nashville conference”
It’s no secret that here at the Tarrant Institute, we’re a bit batty for badges. Not just because they’re shiny and fun to sew on a sash, but because in our initial experiments with badging platforms, we’re seeing increased teacher/learner engagement and motivation. But what does that really mean? Here, guest blogger Valerie Sullivan weighs …
Working through the Dorothy Canfield Fisher books with Edmodo: Warp Speed by Lisa Yee, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanha Lai, incorporating students into Edmodo, badging, book clubs and new scarves. It’s all in here.
The Tarrant Institute has recently begun piloting a trial of Badgestack, an online badging platform, featuring level dynamics, friending and hidden rewards. As part of a course they’re taking via Badgestack, Susan and Audrey recorded this Google+ hangout to talk about how Badgestack might work in a middle school classroom, and their love-hate relationship with The …