Innovative Education in Vermont
Exploring innovative, personalized, student-centered school change
For a lot of kids, science can be something you learn about, instead of something that you do. This is understandable – a lot of experiments that students do in the classroom aren’t exactly leading towards new discoveries. Even if it’s an amazing reaction or a wonderful simulation, it can be hard for students to …
Continue reading “Citizen Science: routes to collaboration on scientific research”
What We’re Reading A ton of things, that’s what! Because we’re participating in the 3rd annual #summerthrowdown reading challenge! How many books can you read in July? More to the point, how many books can more than 100 librarians read?
What We’re Reading Right Now: Minecraft Machinima: Camping Gone Wrong, Killer Grandma and Party Beach out of Flood Brook Union School’s 6th graders You already know we’re huge Touchcast nerds here at TIIE, so we really enjoyed this 7th grade Touchcast about the genetic traits of offspring: [touchcast url=”http://www.touchcast.com/flipsci/offspring_traits_presentation” autoplay=”0″ autoforward=”0″ dimension=”480×270″] Related: actual …
Meet the digital anthropologists of Cabot, Vermont In fulfillment of their project-based learning research this past spring, this pair of middle school students decided to learn more about different regions of the U.S. by interviewing members of their small, rural Vermont town who had lived in those communities. They took the resulting interviews and embedded …
Continue reading “How to: showcase community interviews with digital tools”
It’s that magical, magical time of the year again! No, not the end of the school year. (STOP THAT.) I meant it’s the time of year when your students have a lot of opportunities to share out their year’s worth of learning. And here are 4 great apps for creating presentations on your iPad. 1. Touchcast Touchcast lets students …
Continue reading “4 great apps for creating presentations on your iPad”
Project-based learning is alive and well in rural Vermont As part of The Cabot School‘s Exhibition of Learning earlier this spring, middle school students had a chance to share out some PBL research. Themed around the cultural landscape of the United States, the “See America” exhibit boasted a number of amazing students who showed off outstanding …
Continue reading ““See America”: Cabot students share their PBL research”
Local educators and students presenting at Vermont state conference If you’re one of the many folks planning on attending Dynamic Landscapes 2014, the annual state-wide conference for Vermont’s education scene, be sure to check out these Edmunds and Essex students and educators! They’re presenting at this year’s conference. Kathy Gallagher, Carole Renca and their students will …
Continue reading “Tarrant Institute partners presenting at Dynamic Landscapes”
We’ve been honored to partner with The Edge Academy at Essex Middle School, and a huge reason why is their compelling Wild City Project. In cooperation with the Vermont Audubon Society, the UVM Rubenstein School and other naturalists from around the state, student scientists at The Edge have been studying the fauna surrounding their school …
Continue reading “Wild City @ The Edge: 2 years strong and counting”
Get out there! It’s spring (unless you’re in the Antipodes) and IT HAS FINALLY STOPPED SNOWING. Yes, all those capital letters are really necessary to announce that fact. The sun is out and if you’re planning on doing some outside work with your students, here are four activity ideas for using iPads outside when there’s no access …
Continue reading “Get out! 4 ideas for using iPads outside (and away from Wifi)”
What-smash? Despite sounding like a weird potato-fruit dish, app-smashing gets your students thinking less about apps and more about tasks. Hopefully with a minimum of actual smashing. App-smashing is when you give students a specific assignment that can best be solved using more than one app. iPads4Teachers has a fantastic overview of app-smashing here. Sounds good, …
Continue reading “Think outside the app: 3 outstanding examples of app-smashing”
A teacher with whom I work asked his 7th grade students recently for feedback: “We did this in order to garner information on how to improve the independent learning project that we are currently creating. The big ideas that came out of that survey included the following: They want… More time More consecutive work days …
How one class of 8th grade scientists at Harwood Union Middle School used Google Docs, Schoology, and iPads to capture long-form essays about Rube Goldberg. Featuring everyone’s favorite tech-tastic science educator, Brian Wagner. As HUMS principal Amy Rex commented, “Exemplar teaching and learning — narrow the field and provide rapid feedback :)”
This spring, Nancy Spencer and her class discovered something amazing about their cheek cells. The students discovered that by placing the lens of their iPad cameras directly against the eye-piece of a microscope, they were able to take photos of cells that had, until five minutes earlier, been a part of their bodies. And Spencer …
Continue reading “Authentic cell biology with Notability on the iPad”
Adam Provost, Burlington High School tech integrationist and Partnership for Change Fellow, talks about how to talk to students about potentially dangerous or illegal technologies, and what use of those technologies can mean in terms of privacy and digital citizenship. “I do teach kids what torrents are… how they are used illegally and also — …
Continue reading “Adam Provost on the need for ongoing instruction in digital citizenship”
This morning we’re honored to be able to share a prezi by Currier Memorial School educator Susan Gibeault, on fostering students’ global awareness. Gibeault has taught special education, speech and language and elementary education and received the 2012 BRSU Outstanding Teacher award. This presentation is the culmination of a project she undertook with the …
Continue reading “Fostering global connections with Danby, Vermont”
Guest post by Lindsey Halman, facilitator at The Edge at Essex Middle School: What is a system? How are living things organized? How do the structures of organisms contribute to life’s functions? Learners on the Edge team addressed these questions through a unit on Structure, Function and Information Processing in Living Organisms using the …
As part of celebrating Digital Learning Day yesterday, we visited The Edge team at Essex Middle School for their annual Project Fair, where students share their learning with the community. Here’s a look at some of the amazing work on display.
Vine is a tool where users can craft looping six-second videos for sharing globally, and other users can up-vote them, follow favored Vine-creators (some of whom have one million+ followers) and comment. It’s available for the Android, iOS and Windows platforms, and despite the nominal age-17 requirement for the platform, it’s more than likely that …
Edmunds Middle School teachers, students and district technologists were on Commissioner’s Corner last night , talking about their experiences designing mobile iOS games with ARIS and the Echo Museum. We’re proud to say we knew them way back when. If you’re interested in hearing from Laura Botte and Katie Wyndorf about this project, they’ll be …
Continue reading “Edmunds Middle School is on the airwaves with ARIS”
I know, I know. But let me get a show of hands: how many of you now have that song stuck in your heads? You’re welcome. Whitney Kaulbach is a social studies educator at Lamoille Union High School, and over on her blog, she’s written a compelling and well thought out post on how she …
In case you missed it, we Storified all the amazing tweets, images and sheer joy coming out of Vermont schools yesterday for Day 3 of Computer Science Education Week’s Hour of Code project. Check it out!
When last we left our trusty Edmunds Explorers, they had just defeated a horde of geometry-loving aliens who’d invaded the school, demanding triangles, circles and trapezoids. After that adventure, the two classes of 6th graders took to the streets of Burlington. Lake Street, to be precise, which led them down to the Echo Lake Aquarium …
Emily Howe joined the Tarrant Institute this past summer as our first ever pre-service teacher intern. She was instrumental in pulling off Code Camp, and actively assists in our research. For her first blog post, Howe answered the question: Describe a situation in which you feel instruction could’ve benefited from the appropriate integration of technology. …
Continue reading “Meet Emily Howe, pre-service educator and technology fan”
Via TeachThought, here are 23 ways you can integrate an iPad (and its apps) into a classroom focused on project-based learning (PBL): Image attribution: flickr user flickeringbrad How are you using iPads in your PBL classroom?
by Rachel Goodale (Peoples Academy Middle Level) We started out this year with a Physics Unit studying the relationships between time, distance, and speed. Students worked in partners and were given ten different speed graphs to analyze. They were also given ten different stories explaining the graphs. Students were expected to focus in on …
Continue reading “8th grade VT science: interpreting distance over Touchcast”
I really like to use timelines when teaching the history of scientific discovery. I think that it allows students to see the progression of scientific ideas, and how discoveries build on top of each other. I also would require students to include other historical events that were going on at the time, so that they …
Continue reading “History of a Scientific Discovery – Timeline Construction”
Hi there! My name is Mark Olofson, and I am a new research fellow here at TIIE. I worked for a number of years as a science educator, and I’m going to use this space to share some of the things I learned in the field related to using technological tools to teach science. I’m …
A middle-schooler from Harwood explains how they’re using Explain Everything for a class project to capture stills and videos.
Out at Cabot last Friday to interview some students and teachers about their amazing Seedfolks project, I was reassured to see this sign indicating the school’s commitment to safety: We should all be so fortunate as to say the same.
“It’s not that I feel smarter in learning, I feel smarter in everything.” Essex Middle School’s Edge team opened their doors to the community May 16th as one of three Innovation schools in Vermont. Students and facilitators discussed some of the projects they’ve accomplished and some of the things they’ve learned as part of this …
“Grand Theft Diamond”, a video from Flood Brook Union School’s 6th graders, shows how the popular game Minecraft can be turned into a digital storytelling platform. Check out some more of the Londonderry VT school’s Minecraft projects here.
Page 1 | 2 The annual Rube Goldberg Challenge is an opportunity for students to engage in their inner creative, design-build personalities. They are tasked with completing a simple task through a complex, convoluted, over the top device that incorporates simple machine physics and creative problem solving. There are limits to their space, time, and …
Meet Ryan Becker. He’s an 8th grade science teacher at Woodstock Union Middle School, a UVM doctoral student and tweets under the handle @PhySci8. He and his students use twitter in their classroom, and they’re wondering how many other science teachers do the same. “I’m very interested in how technology, and the web, can be …
A guest post by one of our partner educators, Jacki McCarty. McCarty is an educator at Harwood Union Middle School, in Moretown VT. “The resource I wish to share is THE STUDENTS and MY COLLEAGUES. Through encouragement by my colleagues I have taken risks with technology and found that the students can run with technology …
Keith Nemlich, educator at Manchester Elementary/Middle School, sat down with us and answered six questions about the state of edtech. “I’d like to be obsolete. Seriously. When my school no longer needs me and our students are independently accessing technology in appropriate and meaningful ways, then I’ll know that I have been successful. What would …