It's that time of year again, where everyone reflects on the past year and sets goals, or New Year's resolutions, to better themselves for the upcoming year. As a technology integration specialist, and a member of our district's 21st Century Team, my work this year has been focused on what I can do to help inspire, promote and assist other educators to dive into creating and administering enriching lessons that ask students to solve problems using 21st century skills.
I have to admit there has been a lot of talk about theory and planning for what we can do in the upcoming year, but ultimately our district team, like many others across our nation, have regurgitated 21st century skills to our peers, but have not really defined the purpose for implementing this important task on our teachers.
My biggest goal for this upcoming year, is to model 21st century skills by creating, collaborating, solving complex or open ended problems, and publishing these ideas and strategies to a global audience. Why? Well, because there has been enough talk in mind. It's time to actually put this plan into action. I may crash and burn, but at least I will have practiced what I preach. After all, there is a problem on the table here; How do we prepare our students of today for jobs and careers of the future? There is no set answer, so I will offer one or more solutions and allow my online profession learning network to comment and offer feedback. My hopes are to inspire others to take the lead with me, and jump head first into a new educational paradigm.
My final class for my master's degree is an introductory course on teaching online for grades K-12. Curriculum has always been a passion of mine, and the ability to infuse and embed technology to enhance the lesson has always been something I strongly valued. That's how I fell upon the job of an integration specialist for a school district focused on grades K-4. I also feel that project based learning, game based learning, and creativity can provide an education for our students better than any programmed curriculum or standardized testing that the local district, state or nation believe provides the best assessment of learning strategies and student comprehension.
In my latest eNewsletter, I reflect on the past year a bit, but look towards the future and offer some insight into my goals for the coming year, and what I believe will truly prepare our students for what may lie ahead for them in their own careers. Please feel free to comment and offer feedback. Where is your district headed towards infusing 21st century skills across the curriculum?
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Flat Stanley Project
As adults we have taken for granted receiving mail through the postal service as we have grown up with that form of communication, and probably do not really care if we receive it via a mailbox or in our email inbox any more. Well, unless it's a package. We all love getting packages in the mail. The kids, on the other hand, do not have much experience with writing and receiving actual tangible letters and packages in the mail any more, and their eyes just light up when something comes to the school addressed to them. It's like Christmas morning to them!
After opening their packages and sharing with the rest of their classmates all about their flat selves' visit to lands beyond our little community, they start converting everything to digital format. Photos are scanned in, brochures, posters and souvenirs are captured via a document camera or webcam. The students in Miss Switzer's class then compile all of their digital artifacts and create mini web pages using Apple's iWeb to share what they have learned through their 2D portrayal's travels. This is exactly what the students were presenting to our school board and community last night. The students did a fabulous job and their web pages, each individual unique, are on display for the whole world to see. This is a wonderful project, and everyone in Miss Switzer's class should feel very proud of their accomplishments!
Check out all of the students' web pages on Miss Switzer's Flat Stanley Project page.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Holiday Wish Lists
In my latest eNewsletter for December to the staff at both Village Elementary
School and Coastal Ridge Elementary School, I mentioned how "game
changers", like Apple's iPad 2, are revolutionizing how students are learning in
our elementary classrooms. You only have to look as far as the Auburn School
District in Auburn, Maine, which hosted an international conference during the Thanksgiving
week, to see how these technologies are enhancing education. The school
district allowed educators from all over the world to observe how tablets and
other technologies are being used in their elementary classrooms to inspire and
engage all students. Visitors were welcomed into classrooms and attended
conferences after school hours to learn first hand from teachers and students
how these technologies have changed the face of education in their district.
Online streams, blogs and Tweets were presented by educators and students
to members watching online as well. Students are learning through designated
applications that focus on particular skills or problem solving strategies, and
finding that Game-Based Learning is fun and engaging.
Game-Based Learning is not a new concept. The Everyday Math program really opened my eyes to this form of teaching style when the school district I used to work for adopted the program in 2002. Instead of rote math facts done over-and-over again to promote mastery, games were created and played to practice math facts and computations that were inspiring, engaging and exciting to the students. I learned first-hand as a third grade teacher that students were picking up on these skills much faster with game play then using more traditional methods of work sheets and practice papers. With the overly popular iOS devices in classrooms, iPads and iPods can be used to allow students to work on particular skills by playing games. Games also provide solid feedback to the child and a raw score to the educator, or parent, as another form of data of the students’ learning.
Game-Based Learning can take a bit of time to research which are the best apps for your child, but in the long-run can truly be the catalyst that engages all of your learners at your house and individualizes their educational path to meet their individual needs. As gift lists are being created for the holidays, and smart phones are being upgraded, remember that your child could benefit from educational Game-Based Learning at home too! I am hoping that the big guy will upgrade my iPhone this year, and in return I will transform my old iPhone 3G into an iPod for my little girl full of preschool and baby genius apps for the upcoming year. I can't wait to start family game night at my house with a balance of electronic and non-electronic games.
Eric Lawson has been teaching for 12 years. He has previously taught 3rd grade in Kennebunk before taking on the job of Technology Integration Specialist for the elementary schools here in York. He has been published in eSchool News, Tech&Learning Magazine and Learning and Leading with Technology Magazine for technology integrated projects and ideas. He is the author of the blog, "Computer Lab Without Walls", and offers extra curricular courses integrating technology through the York Parks and Recreation Department and Adult Education Programs.
Game-Based Learning is not a new concept. The Everyday Math program really opened my eyes to this form of teaching style when the school district I used to work for adopted the program in 2002. Instead of rote math facts done over-and-over again to promote mastery, games were created and played to practice math facts and computations that were inspiring, engaging and exciting to the students. I learned first-hand as a third grade teacher that students were picking up on these skills much faster with game play then using more traditional methods of work sheets and practice papers. With the overly popular iOS devices in classrooms, iPads and iPods can be used to allow students to work on particular skills by playing games. Games also provide solid feedback to the child and a raw score to the educator, or parent, as another form of data of the students’ learning.
Game-Based Learning can take a bit of time to research which are the best apps for your child, but in the long-run can truly be the catalyst that engages all of your learners at your house and individualizes their educational path to meet their individual needs. As gift lists are being created for the holidays, and smart phones are being upgraded, remember that your child could benefit from educational Game-Based Learning at home too! I am hoping that the big guy will upgrade my iPhone this year, and in return I will transform my old iPhone 3G into an iPod for my little girl full of preschool and baby genius apps for the upcoming year. I can't wait to start family game night at my house with a balance of electronic and non-electronic games.
Eric Lawson has been teaching for 12 years. He has previously taught 3rd grade in Kennebunk before taking on the job of Technology Integration Specialist for the elementary schools here in York. He has been published in eSchool News, Tech&Learning Magazine and Learning and Leading with Technology Magazine for technology integrated projects and ideas. He is the author of the blog, "Computer Lab Without Walls", and offers extra curricular courses integrating technology through the York Parks and Recreation Department and Adult Education Programs.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Game-Based Learning
In this edition of the December eNewsletter, I have included some great resources and links for bringing Game-Based Learning into the classroom. How is Game-Based Learning being used in your classroom or school?
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
A World Without Power
During the Halloween weekend, the east coast got pounded with it's first big Noreaster of the season. Living in Maine, I have grown accustom to the long winters, but starting in October is a bit ridiculous even for our standards. At my house we only lost power for about 27 hours, but many people around us and certainly in southern New Hampshire lost it for almost an entire week. It got me to thinking...
We truly have started to become completely dependent on technology and the ease of accessibility anywhere at any time. I was thinking to myself, that I really had to mail in my assignment on Saturday before the storm hit, because my town of Wells, Maine has become a ghost town now that the tourist and "leaf peepers" season is officially over. It would have taken me 30 minutes to drive to a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi.
We truly have started to become completely dependent on technology and the ease of accessibility anywhere at any time. I was thinking to myself, that I really had to mail in my assignment on Saturday before the storm hit, because my town of Wells, Maine has become a ghost town now that the tourist and "leaf peepers" season is officially over. It would have taken me 30 minutes to drive to a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi.
A colleague and I were discussing that the future of the military will probably no longer be investing so highly in explosives but rather in new technologies like Pulses and Pinches. These are like mini generators that when activated, will actually take out an area completely so that there is no power. The scene from "Ocean's 11" where they are ready to rob Andy Garcia's casino comes rushing back to my mind.
We were fortunate enough to have power back on at school on Monday when we returned, but it took 3.5 hours for the IT department to get our network and Internet connection back online. I truly felt useless at school in those hours and couldn't even access my calendar to see whom I needed to postpone our meeting with as it was locked up in our network.
eNewsletter November
In this month's edition of my eNewsletter, I dive a little deeper into the Apple iOS update and what it means in an educational setting.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
21st Century Team
The York School Department has established a 21st Century district team. This team is a compilation of different administrators, tech. integrators, and a variety of classroom teachers that span the entire K-12 perspective from all of the schools within our district. Members were asked to apply for the position in the spring of 2009 and the Superintendent of Schools, Director of Technology and Curriculum Coordinator met to establish the team and coordinate the first introductory meeting in the fall of 2010. In our first year, we really tried to establish what 21st century skills look like for York teachers, and every member was given an iPad by the district to play and learn more about how mobile technologies can promote problem solving and 21st century skills on the go. It took the entire year really to establish our mission. We met once a month during the school year, to understand our goals and to really identify what we wanted to do in order to help move education in York into the present and hope to look towards the future.
This has been a real frustration for many members, as things were discussed and sorted out, but rarely was a true decision made by the team at any given meeting. We all wanted to move forward, but were not sure that the group, as a whole, knew how or could agree on what it was that needed to be done in order to do that. Unlike other district teams that I have been on, within this district and in others, there was no real target to shoot for or goals/steps to check off as they were completed. We were treading in open water. There were certainly some resources that have helped pave the way, or shed a little light towards a distant end of a tunnel, but it was tough to take a step without knowing where we wanted to go in the first place. For this reason it has been a slow process.
This year's goals for the team are to create windows of how teachers and students within our district are already using 21st century skills in-and-out of the classroom. Hopefully with these examples published, other teachers, community members, administrators and school board members will understand what it is that we are looking for and trying to achieve. It's a good first step anyway. Another big goal for the team this year is to plan out a full day teacher inservice centered around 21st century skills. This presents an interesting issue and potential problem. In the past, this inservice day has been designed around technology as a whole, and in more recent years, technology as it integrates within everyone's curriculum. Inservice days are always met with mixed emotions by the staff. Time is always an issue in education and giving a teacher some time without students can truly be beneficial if the day is planned out correctly. In the past few years, teachers have not seen these inservice days as planned out to help them, but rather as one more thing on their plate that caused stress and anxiety. Technology integration, in my eyes, should not be counted as "one more thing" as in many cases it is already happening all over the place, but I do see how one can be concerned with a new set of skills that are needed in order to manipulate the technologies to fully engage students and bring about higher quality of work and thinking. I'm just afraid that a day labeled, "21st Century Skills", even though we are 11 years into the 21st century already, will be looked at as just one more thing to add to the overcrowded teachers' plates. So how do we create a day, centered around 21st century skills that will be met by teachers with excitement and a sense that it can be accomplished without adding too much? It's a daunting task for sure, and one that I fear may take a lot more meetings then we have time for. Do you have any ideas, or have you created something like that in your district?
The third and final goal for our group this year is to create a base line online professional development course for all educators within our district that clearly label how York would like to continue with 21st century skills, and provide opportunities to the learner to research, examine, play and reflect on web 2.0, mobile, and other technology tools that can enhance the teaching experience and therefore the learning of each and every student that walks through the doors within the York School Department. I've taken several online courses, as I am finishing up my masters degree in the Technology in Education program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, however, many of the classes are setup in modules in which we were asked to research how a task could be used in class, read examples of potential outcomes, create a product or task for our students to try out and then reflect on the outcomes. These are all good practices, but each tool that I have used was the focus of the task. Teaching technology tools are great, but in order to promote 21st century skills and also hopefully only have each staff member take the course once within their tenure here in York, we will need to make it more of a theory and methods course. Heck, the way technology changes and improves, by the time the teacher taking course learns how to Tweet, we may have a better way to communicate in a similar way. I'm reminded of how I felt when I heard the Flip camera was no longer going to be manufactured after spending 4 professional development days with staff showing them how to use the technology and import the footage into a video editing software program in order to publish their masterpieces to the web. Again this will be a difficult task. Has anyone out there created a baseline class for either tech. integration or 21st century for education staff?
This has been a real frustration for many members, as things were discussed and sorted out, but rarely was a true decision made by the team at any given meeting. We all wanted to move forward, but were not sure that the group, as a whole, knew how or could agree on what it was that needed to be done in order to do that. Unlike other district teams that I have been on, within this district and in others, there was no real target to shoot for or goals/steps to check off as they were completed. We were treading in open water. There were certainly some resources that have helped pave the way, or shed a little light towards a distant end of a tunnel, but it was tough to take a step without knowing where we wanted to go in the first place. For this reason it has been a slow process.
This year's goals for the team are to create windows of how teachers and students within our district are already using 21st century skills in-and-out of the classroom. Hopefully with these examples published, other teachers, community members, administrators and school board members will understand what it is that we are looking for and trying to achieve. It's a good first step anyway. Another big goal for the team this year is to plan out a full day teacher inservice centered around 21st century skills. This presents an interesting issue and potential problem. In the past, this inservice day has been designed around technology as a whole, and in more recent years, technology as it integrates within everyone's curriculum. Inservice days are always met with mixed emotions by the staff. Time is always an issue in education and giving a teacher some time without students can truly be beneficial if the day is planned out correctly. In the past few years, teachers have not seen these inservice days as planned out to help them, but rather as one more thing on their plate that caused stress and anxiety. Technology integration, in my eyes, should not be counted as "one more thing" as in many cases it is already happening all over the place, but I do see how one can be concerned with a new set of skills that are needed in order to manipulate the technologies to fully engage students and bring about higher quality of work and thinking. I'm just afraid that a day labeled, "21st Century Skills", even though we are 11 years into the 21st century already, will be looked at as just one more thing to add to the overcrowded teachers' plates. So how do we create a day, centered around 21st century skills that will be met by teachers with excitement and a sense that it can be accomplished without adding too much? It's a daunting task for sure, and one that I fear may take a lot more meetings then we have time for. Do you have any ideas, or have you created something like that in your district?
The third and final goal for our group this year is to create a base line online professional development course for all educators within our district that clearly label how York would like to continue with 21st century skills, and provide opportunities to the learner to research, examine, play and reflect on web 2.0, mobile, and other technology tools that can enhance the teaching experience and therefore the learning of each and every student that walks through the doors within the York School Department. I've taken several online courses, as I am finishing up my masters degree in the Technology in Education program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, however, many of the classes are setup in modules in which we were asked to research how a task could be used in class, read examples of potential outcomes, create a product or task for our students to try out and then reflect on the outcomes. These are all good practices, but each tool that I have used was the focus of the task. Teaching technology tools are great, but in order to promote 21st century skills and also hopefully only have each staff member take the course once within their tenure here in York, we will need to make it more of a theory and methods course. Heck, the way technology changes and improves, by the time the teacher taking course learns how to Tweet, we may have a better way to communicate in a similar way. I'm reminded of how I felt when I heard the Flip camera was no longer going to be manufactured after spending 4 professional development days with staff showing them how to use the technology and import the footage into a video editing software program in order to publish their masterpieces to the web. Again this will be a difficult task. Has anyone out there created a baseline class for either tech. integration or 21st century for education staff?
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