Innovative Education in Vermont
Exploring innovative, personalized, student-centered school change
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where technology fits into reading. Not just the e-book vs print book discussion (spoiler: both choices are valid for any individual) but also how tech tools and platforms can bring readers together to talk about books. And I’m doing that by reading a lot and trying things.
So my summer reading list comes with a tool kit.
This past academic year was one of the busiest and most invigorating year I have had in my time as a student or teacher. As my role here at the Tarrant Institute has grown and focused more deeply on the research side of things, I have also been progressing towards my PhD. The summer doesn’t really provide a break, per se, but it does give me time to dive into some books I’ve been eying all year. Here’s a few things I’m making sure to get through.
Continue reading “Education reform, more education reform and David Foster Wallace”
Students at Fayston Elementary School worked hard this year with their team of teachers, not just to implement personal learning plans (PLPs), but to understand them to such a level that they could tell their stories. Using the digital tools Adobe Voice and Explain Everything, students crafted video explanations of their individual PLP projects to share with their families at student-led conferences.
Part of the power of implementing a negotiated curriculum is that it doesn’t just center student voice, it actually moves the learning space towards a democratic classroom, a place where students can advocate for themselves and their learning interests, goals and styles. It’s an important piece of the personalized learning plan (PLP) picture.
The Edge Academy at Essex Middle School, in Essex Junction VT, has been doing project-based learning alongside negotiated curriculum for the past six years. Facilitators Lindsey Halman and Phil Young explain what makes it work and what makes it especially powerful for middle schoolers.
Continue reading “Negotiated curriculum and project-based learning”
As the end of June nears and students take their final exams, clear out their lockers, and begin sleeping in until noon, teachers are gathering their remaining energy, and administrators are giving them space, to take stock of the year, celebrate the successes and challenges, and together learn from them.
But what’s the best way to assess technology-rich instruction and the 1:1 environment?
This statement was the driving philosophy behind our purchase of a class set of Sphero programmable robots to coincide with our school’s participation in the International Hour Of Code Day this year. During our introductory assemblies for the Hour Of Code, one Sphero was demonstrated as a teaser of what could be done with code. Then, they went into storage for a bit while we pondered how to introduce them in a class setting.
“Work-based learning experiences are activities that involve actual work experience or that connect classroom learning to employment and careers. Through work-based learning experiences, educational programs become more relevant, rigorous, challenging, and rewarding for students, parents, educators, and businesses. These opportunities particularly help students make the connection between academic principles and real world applications.”
–Vermont Agency of Education
If you’re a student on the 8th grade team at Mill River Union High School in North Clarendon, Vermont, you’re leading the way in this arena: it’s tradition that every eighth grader at this school experiences a Career Exploration unit in the spring of their year.
The story of MakerSpace at Crossett Brook Middle School begins with two bunnies. The bunnies lived outside the library in a hutch built by our Sustainability students who loved the bunnies. Winter was coming… the bunnies needed to move inside. The sad turn in this story is that the bunnies were not able to stay. Being in cages in the library with many daily visitors caused them stress. So, once I found a happy home for them and they moved out… poof!
A space was now available…an empty table…no books on it…no piles…what was possible?
Continue reading “MakerSpace Wonderland at Crossett Brook MS”
Is curiosity important? What does it mean to be a curious learner? What am I curious about?
These are some of the questions Cornwall, VT students considered this winter as they embarked on inquiry-based, personalized, research projects. For six weeks, we turned learning over to our students for the (first annual!) Curiosity Projects.
Continue reading “Curiosity Projects: A stepping-stone to Personalized Learning”
We’ve all been there: how do you fit 40 minutes worth of information into a 20-minute parent conference, still have time for questions AND stay on schedule? Bulletin boards hanging in the hallway help. They serve two purposes, engaging parents while they wait and giving parents a view into the classroom. But that view is static and doesn’t always feel authentic.
Mrs. Natalie Byrne, a 1st grade teacher at Christ the King School, found herself considering these questions as conference days grew near. Her solution reminded me of the answer to a riddle: once you see it, it seems obvious, but only after you rub the grit out of your eyes. She proposed engaging parents through their smartphones with an interactive bulletin board full of QR codes linked to videos.
What was once a standard in news broadcasting and video game production has now found a new home in classrooms. Students and teachers have embraced the teleporting powers of the green screen which adds addition layers of engagement and perspective for school projects. The best part, for schools budgets, is this is a very inexpensive set up and there are several programs or apps that are free! Inexpensive and or free… Intrigued yet?
When using green screen’s you can be teleported to the top of the Great Wall of China, swimming 20,000 leagues under the sea, standing inside a piece of art, or in a sophisticated news media studio.
Oh Hamlet, you would be so perplexed on this one!
I’m sometimes asked this question as the mother of an Instagram-using 12 year old myself. Parents of young adults often are conflicted about making this choice – at least, if your child is connected to social media – and likely, he or she is.
If your child does interact with others on social media platforms, how should you guide, monitor and support their presence on social media?
Continue reading “Helping your teen or tween with social media”
The team from Hazen Union Middle School, in Hardwick, Vermont, conducted an action research project over the fall semester of 2015, centered around deepening students’ connection to their community. They called the unit “I Belong”.
It provided students with tech-rich opportunities to engage with the small and rural community of their town.
Every two years our team does an interdisciplinary unit on the European Renaissance. I’m a big believer in learning history from the inside out, by asking students to really look at individual people. I also wanted to do something that connected things that kids were interested in to this time period. To get them to really feel as if they were some of these people, it just made sense to connect modern technology using the smartphone, since many of them are on their smartphones a lot of the time anyway.
So what would happen if you found Leonardo DaVinci’s smartphone?
Arts and citizenship is for 8th graders at Shelburne Community School. This past session, they had a digital media focus, looking at photography and Photoshop and digital manipulation.
Most recently they just had a Community Celebration, where the artwork was posted around the school and families and the community came in to admire it and meet the artists. QR codes linked each piece to the artist’s reflection — reflections that took place weekly, capturing the ongoing progression of thoughts and creativity as the piece was produced.
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 42 minutes to signal transitions. The speaker in my library was broken and for whatever reason none of us could figure out how to turn it down, so at eight 42-minute intervals throughout each day, a jarring, disruptive, and impossible-to-ignore screech blared.
In a space meant for reflection, quiet and focused learning, deep dives into inquiry, this interrupter literally felt like chalkboard nails reminding us our schedule boxed us in. I share this story because in my quest to consider how access to technology can support personalized learning, I have been interested in how pacing and timing play a role in middle level classrooms.
Let’s be honest, there’s not many days dedicated to the celebration of math or its concepts. This is why math folks get a little energized every March 14th. Picking up where last year’s Pi Day post left off, this is an opportunity to plan for activities or celebrations in the classroom, but more importantly infuse some enjoyment into the math culture.
As more and more school move to Chromebooks we receive lots of requests for chrome compatible programs and applications. In a time of transition to deeper personalization, Screencasting has become one of the most popular requests. There’s power having students talk through their evidence of learning and reflection all on one screen and easily exported to their personal learning plan (PLP). Let’s look at some screencasting options on the Chromebook.
Recently, I was charmed and inspired upon seeing a first grade student’s take on setting goals to improve healthy habits on the Franklin West Supervisory Union blog. I shared this student photo (at left) with a group of teachers during a goal-setting and reflection workshop. They all smiled, especially after I asked them to think about what evidence this student might gather and share to demonstrate she has met this resolution.
Wouldn’t we all love to see that collection of “demonstrated joy” from all of our students? Of course, that would require us to create “joyous” learning opportunities or at the very least honor students’ joyous learning where ever it takes place.
In addition to being an educator, I’m also a parent — of three spunky children between the ages of 5 and 12. Like many people, my husband and I bring our work home with us; more specifically, work and home are often one in the same.
Though we both enjoy and appreciate the benefits of technology in both our work and personal lives, we also recognize that it’s hard to disconnect from outside activities and connect in person with the people we love. In today’s world, we both feel how difficult it is to distinguish work time from family-time and couple-time, and the Holy Grail: personal-time.
But for the sake of our children, these healthy habits are what we have to model.
Continue reading “How parents can model healthy tech habits”
I’m always looking for ways for educators and students at different schools to use technology to connect in far-flung locations. One middle-level educator was kind enough to share how he used Google Hangouts, a Google+ Community, back-channeling and plain old email to enable his students to connect with students a couple of states away.
Continue reading “Using Google tools to connect with other schools”
A few years ago I had the opportunity to participate in the Vermont School Leadership Project (VSLP) through the Snelling Center for Government, where I was pushed to truly examine who I was as an educator and what preferences I have in terms of decision-making.
When we overlay the Teaming lens on this activity we begin to understand how we interact and react with our teaching teams, leadership teams, whole faculty, and even in our home lives.
At Manchester Elementary Middle School, sixth grade students speak fluently about their Personal Learning Plans (PLPs). They’ve been working on setting goals in a PLP for years; some students in this school have been doing so since third grade.
Manchester educators Seth Bonnett and Melissa Rice, share what they’ve learned about the necessary supports as teachers and students collaborate around goals.
Continue reading “Providing support for goal-setting in a PLP”
As a new year dawns, are you thinking about self improvement? A Personal Learning Plan (PLP) is a great way to plan and document your professional growth, provide a framework for reflection, and gain a better understanding of how to make PLPs most useful for your students.
In my current work with a number of Vermont middle schools, we have been trying to grapple with ways to tell the story of, or create a better understanding of, what our state’s Act 77 Flexible Pathways legislation looks like in action.
Continue reading “Act 77, Flexible Pathways and best middle level practices”
Vermont’s Act 77, the Flexible Pathways Act, mandates that every student in grades 7-12 statewide have a Personal Learning Plan or PLP. And that’s about the extent of the instructions. As to how this can be accomplished?
The field is wide open.
Continue reading “Checking in on personalized learning around Vermont”
Podcasts have been around for awhile now but can be a little intimidating in terms of knowing the technical aspect of how to launch one. Thinking of starting one for your school but need a little help unpacking the tech?
Here’s how to get started podcasting, the technical version.
Continue reading “How to get started podcasting with SoundCloud”
In a recent blog post, I suggested access to technology can empower teachers to be responsive to students’ needs in a blended learning environment. I want to expand upon that notion and explore further how Open Educational Resources play an important role in how we teachers facilitate more personalized learning experiences.
Continue reading “Personalize learning with Open Educational Resources”
Let’s face it, it’s a challenge to balance technology in our lives; but it’s essential.
Parents and adults need to guide their young adolescents and children towards developing this balance. Arguably, we don’t have good technology habits ourselves, but the modeling and mentoring of developing a healthy relationship with technology is a critical role for parents.
According to recent studies, math teachers, tend to integrate technology into their teaching less frequently than those in other disciplines(1).
What was at the core of these research findings I wondered? And what do we know about math classrooms here in Vermont?
In my experience as a teacher and administrator, I noticed a pattern to goal-setting in my school and classroom. We would do some good goal-setting at the beginning of the year and then at some point during the dark depths of winter I would realize that I was too overwhelmed or embarrassed to try to resurrect them.
There were some notable instances when goals were powerful for students, though.
In those cases I saw the potential of goals to cultivate so many important things in my students: self-direction, a sense of efficacy, and a connection to schooling, to name a few.
Continue reading “What makes for good goal-setting in a PLP?”
Two weeks ago I attended the annual conference of the Association of Middle Level Educators (AMLE). I have been working in middle level education for most of my professional career, but this was my first time at the conference.
Overall, I had a fantastic AMLE experience. I was exposed to some interesting and important research. I was lucky to meet some incredible practitioners and heartened to hear about innovative practices being employed on behalf of young adolescents. I also spent some quality bonding time with my colleagues.
My generally positive experience, however, was slightly marred by what has become all-too-familiar at large education conference: disappointing keynotes.
As social media,Youtube, and gaming become more educationally relevant, how do we leverage their educational potential while keeping student data safe and teaching them digital citizenship?
Lock it down! “We need to keep everyone safe.”
Open it up! “It’s how the real world operates.”
I’ve heard strong arguments for both sides of the coin and have seen successes and challenges in both cases.
Vialogues: visual dialogues. Video dialogues.
(Visible violet dogs? Risible eyelet hogs? Dirigible side-slit frogs?)
Vialogues are an online tool that encourages viewers to answer one specific question about a video, and the tool creates a comment thread based on the answers.
When applied in an educational capacity, this creates a space for social learning.
When “21st century skills” first emerged as an educational term, we were just on the precipice of our new century, and talking about the next one hundred years felt future-forward. Now, fifteen years in, “21st century” to me implies current more than future.
“21st century,” then, as a descriptor for a set of skills, gets confusing.
There are so many reasons to appreciate how we teach adolescents to write in Vermont. One of these gifts is the resource of the Young Writer’s Project.
Let’s look at what makes this online resource so powerful for educators to present as an option for students looking to explore their writers’ identities.
Is extra credit still a valid notion as we move towards ubiquitous learning, and grapple with questions of equity in education?
If the goal is anytime, anywhere learning, how can we quantify certain activities as eXtraneous to that learning space?
Teachers at Lamoille Union Middle/High School learn about the latest tools and resources available to them in a unique and engaging way. Marc Gilbertson, the Integration Specialist and Meagan Towle, the librarian, carve out 20 minutes in their busy schedules to get together and crank out a short video podcast series called the Weekly Geek to share available resources.
Check out this week’s entry demonstrating three tools to encourage visual and audio engagement in learning.
As students use technology to explore and capture projects that show both their emerging proficiency with skills and snapshots of who they have been, are and may become, tools that allow students to add their own human voice to multimedia can be invaluable in the discovery and showcasing process.
Here’s why voice recordings work for young adolescents and 3 tools we like for creating them.
We hear a lot of hype about e-learning, blended learning, MOOCS, and mobile learning. But even a quick investigation of these trends reveals that effective teaching and learning are as elusive as ever.
Yet ubiquitous computing — that is, anytime, anywhere access — is only a stepping stone to ubiquitous learning.
Timeline tools can serve two important purposes: concrete help with project planning (for PLPs, 1:1 rollouts, PBL) and for displaying evidence of learning in an easily digestible format.
But the online, anytime/anywhere, collaborative nature of such tools can unlock meta-learning for students, providing them with a platform for bolstering collaboration and project-planning skills.
Ah, reflection. It may bring to mind an introspective moment, perhaps gazing into the still waters of a mountain lake and seeing a slightly puzzled person staring back. That’s not the kind of reflection we are talking about here.
Reflection in a 21st Century learning sense is a key component of personalized learning.
Reflection allows students to construct knowledge, make personal connections, and ultimately become self-driven learners. More like a trailside break on a wilderness trek than a lazy lakeside afternoon. Continue reading “R is for REAL Reflection”
These simple workhorses of technology — ink and blank spaces on a screen or page — can be incredibly powerful in making learning an anytime, anywhere endeavor, and turning the world into a classroom.
When working with a group of middle school science teachers recently whose goal was to increase the depth of knowledge in their shared common assessments, we explored using Performance Tasks as a way to measure student knowledge and skills gained, as they apply them in novel and real situations.
It’s the “do” in the KUD (know, understand, and do) that so often gets left behind, but is so important in the world of deep learning.
During a five minute reflection, if a student is given one minute to find a picture and mark the mouth, then he or she still has four minutes to try to come up with something interesting to reflect about. So this is four minutes more than they may have spent if they were asked to just write, or required to use a tool that they weren’t that interested in.
–Life Legeros
Online collaboration takes on new significance as students extend their learning network in conjunction with more personalized and meaningful learning: they can use online networks to learn with mentors, with community partners, remote collaborators and with asynchronous and synchronous group work.
Educators instinctively understand the engagement power of a tool that allows learners to actively participate in the learning.
For those of you new to Nearpod, this multi-platform app allows teachers to shoot out presentations — think Powerpoints or Google Slides made interactive — directly to their students’ devices. Content slides can be interspersed with embedded polls, quizzes, and drawing tools for in-the-moment formative assessment.
You’ve jumped through the hoops, filled out the paperwork, located the three missing chargers and managed to agree on a set of apps and a management system. But what will expectations around tech device usage look like? Will they stay in classrooms? Go home? Hop in a circle and do spoken-word?
Let’s tackle establishing behavior expectations in a 1:1 rollout.
Continue reading “Establishing behavior expectations in a 1:1”
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.
Continue reading “L is for Learning Management System (LMS)”
For a review game “killer app” recommendation, Kahoot is by far at the top of my list.
Kahoot, if you have not yet had the pleasure of being acquainted, quite frankly, is a riot no matter what your age.
Just-in-time learning in its best form is “Just for me” learning. When you learn something because you yearn to understand it, precisely when you need to apply it, you will learn it deeply and joyfully. Your brain will soak it up because your heart is in it.
Now, how does that translate to providing just-in-time-teaching?
Much like being friends on social media, physical proximity has little to do connecting people with other people. Google Hangouts has successfully made communication between individuals or groups and accessing information a bit easier and some may save they even have shrunk the world.
The act of simply registering, storing, charging, keeping track of and distributing apps to devices in a 1:1 environment is a full set of challenges on its own. And so, while we’ll later this week get to the other two important aspects of Group Device Management — Behavior Expectations and Communicating With Families — let’s take a few minutes to tackle the physical realities of suddenly having mumble-hundred pieces of identical technology arrive at your door.
How can technology help make communicating with your students’ families easier? These 4 edtech tools for family communication offer different ways to open the door to your classroom and welcome families inside.
Resources like e-books are a common “first step” when we think about integrating technology into the classroom. However, simply substituting an e-book for a traditional book ignores the opportunity to shift towards more student-centered practices. In a recent article, Chronis Kynigos reported on a joint effort between teachers and programmers to develop a “C-book;” an e-book that implements elements of constructionism.
Continue reading “E is for e-books …or are they “C-books”?”
In its simplest form, digital workflow exchanges the paper and pencil transfer of information for a centralized digital system where information is pushed out, synthesized, analyzed, or created and returned to the teacher.
With the increasing popularity of 1:1 programs, or readily available access to technology, the form in which learning transfers between people, adults and students, looks slightly different than when I was in school. Additionally, the availability of free programs, such as Google Classroom, help to promote the cycle of information in an effective way.
Our students live in technology-rich worlds, regardless of how much technology they are using in school on a day-to-day basis. Technology has all kinds of awesome educational benefits, but Uncle Ben’s advice to Spiderman is fitting here: “With great power comes great responsibility.” As educators we’re obliged to help students use technology appropriately and safely.
Continue reading “C is for Citizenship (digital of course!)”
As I look at what I am reading and want to read this summer, it’s kind of all over the place. I’ll be reading about Vermont education, racial justice, and some fiction in the fantasy genre. Continue reading “Good Stories and Hard Truths: Summer Reading”
Summer in Vermont brings on a different set of activities, a different pace of life, and an opportunity for renewal – at least for me. Last week I had a chance to connect with nature in a way I hadn’t in a long time. I finally got out on my mountain bike and did some exploring and tried to remember all the great reading recommendation from the past year. There were too many to remember, much less to read in one summer. Next time I’ll write them down! Summer also offers up the opportunity to have a little more choice in what I read. That night I did some searching and finalist my summer reading list. My goal is 10 books by the end of August. So here goes… Continue reading “Top Ten Summer Reading Recommendations”
Howdy. I’m Rachel – new Professional Development Coordinator at the Tarrant Institute. I live in the beautiful southern part of Vermont and am thrilled to join the staff of TIIE after 16 years of teaching literacy and social studies to amusing adolescents.
Typically, I devour books during the summer. One of my favorite things to do is to ignore the demands of my children, my household, and my job, and just get lost in a book. It is summer, after all.
The Community Sailing Center (CSC) in Burlington has developed a multi-age, year-round environmental curriculum that works in conjunction with local schools to teach the opportunistic, seasonal lessons provided by Burlington’s landscape. Floating Classrooms engages students with their environment through ecology, science, and a medium the CSC holds dear: sailing.
Social media gives you a number of different ways to meet great innovative educators, willing to share what they’re doing in their classroom, but it can quickly eat up your valuable free time. Plus it’s just so shiny that you only ever mean to sit down and give it a quick look, then BAM! You rub your aching eyes and it’s ten o’clock on a Sunday night again.
So how do you make the most of social media for professional development without letting it eat your life? Here’s 4 ways to keep social media manageable.
As I walked through an innovation showcase at SxSw 2015 (one of the the largest convergences of creative and critical thinkers last March) I was struck by the juxtaposition of two tables that were adjacent to each other.
One offered “Creative Circuit kits provide girls with all of the materials to make 10+ arts, crafts, and fashion projects with technology” the other offered “opportunities for students to replicate experiments you perform in your classrooms using an Arduino kit and a sensor kit on a nano-satellite via Nasa’s CubeSat Launch Initiatives.”
As a long time advocate for initiatives that increase the confidence and skills of girls with technology, I appreciate that the “creative circuit kit” might provide a great opportunity to engage girls with technology, but I find myself concerned that it would be easy to gain a false sense of accomplishment if we don’t move beyond ‘bling’.
I find myself wondering what are the steps that connect the excitement from “blink blink” to the curiosity that leaves you wondering “what type of sensor do I need to create an experiment that I can test in space?”
Continue reading “Beyond Bling: how do we deepen Makerspace learning?”
When I think about educational technology, it has never for me been divorced from pedagogy. As soon as I encounter a new digital tool, although it might attract me at first based on its novelty, my mind immediately jumps to the connection of how can I use this with my students to __________. I fill in that blank with all manner of things to include: uncover what they’ve learned, inspire deep thinking, provide a visual prompt or clue, create an engaging hook, etc. So, sometimes I’m taken aback when colleagues suggest teachers who embrace technology “tool hop” without any intentionality or simply like to play with then next new, shiny toy.
