See how one teacher's challenge-based learning project (Disney Planet Challenge) transformed her classroom around a focused theme, unifying her class as they were empowered with purpose-driven technology skills. Projects included videos, podcasts, blogs, Scratch games, a Web site, presentations and Skype calls. Challenge-based learning fosters an environment of collaboration, creativity, purpose and an excitement for learning. In this challenge-based learning project, students had to identify a goal, develop guiding questions and activities, create a plan and put their plan into action. Students became advocates for a threatened species, the Blanding’s turtle, collecting and studying data around a Blanding’s turtle head-starting program, proposing a potential preservation area and also developing a publicity campaign to alert people in Concord about the turtles - including stories, brochures, posters, podcasts, public events and movies. This project was submitted to the Disney Planet Challenge national competition in February 2011 and was awarded second place.
This session is about transcending school reform to make new forms of school. It centers on creating learning environments designed to go beyond achievement to foster engagement in all types of K-12 settings. The session will be particularly useful for people starting plans for new schools or extensive redesign of existing schools.
This workshop will engage participants in lively discussion about:
This session will explore the above ideas in detail and devote significant time to collaborative online development/sharing of:
Creative educational principles and a school community's values should drive design decisions for physical changes to the school environment, big or small. Whether it is a media center makeover or a major construction project, our perspectives as the expert educators, not the construction experts, should set the vision and inspire the decision-making and building process. Our major school construction projects found their inspiration and informed direction in conversations about learning, not layout. Find out how to uncover connections and resources locally and globally to create practical, meaningful spaces for all kinds of learning. Good questions are the most important tool!
Join us as we explore how innovative teachers employed action research and challenge-based learning methodologies in their classrooms over a span of 12 months. These projects yielded highly significant results, behavioral and data driven, both from students and teachers. These teachers are part of an online masters degree focusing on emergent media and immersive learning environments for learners of all ages. A partial requirement of this degree is to conduct an action research project as well as a challenge based-learning initiative.
Challenge Based Learning requires the teacher to be part of the learning process and work along side the students to produce possible solutions. Solutions will often reflect individual interests and desires, which motivate students to take ownership of their learning. These solutions are shared with a global audience, which brings attention to communication, collaboration, critical thinking and evaluation, skills for the 21st century.
“In today’s world, it’s no longer how much you know that matters; it’s what you can do with what you know.” With this belief, students need to be engaged in meaningful tasks, which represent their point of view and understanding. In the session, we will explore how using stop motion animation with elementary school children creates a classroom community of problem solving, collaboration, imagination and communication. We believe that learning is authentic when each student is an active participant in his or her own education. The presenters will:
Come explore and discover the latest iOS apps for learning, play and productivity! Douglas Kiang will present the top apps he and his colleagues at Punahou School have been using to enhance learning in the classroom, and help learners of all ages to be more productive, organized and better informed.
Google Apps for Education provides a free cross platform set of tools for educators. You can create Web sites, collect digital homework, manage student portfolios and much more. If your district has adopted Google Apps for Education, or is thinking about it, then this session is for you. Many districts have dived into Google Apps without a clear system for managing the digital work created there by teachers and students. We will walk through tips and tricks in setting up a Google Apps Domain and include real examples and best practices of how to utilize these tools in an educational setting.
Come experience the power of giving 18-year-old students the opportunity to design personal learning pathways during the last semester of high school. You will see how each individual student focus became the vehicle through which they demonstrated their cumulative skills in research, product development, community service and public speaking.
Attendees will learn how our five-year program leverages a defunct state requirement into a rich, 21st century cornucopia while most of our students take full college loads. Hear of the challenges as well as our student’s successes as we engaged our local community to meet the burgeoning needs of students in today’s classrooms.
Student examples will include:
Classroom conversation and learning should be conceptual. Through inquiry driven curriculum, students are inspired to question, to think, to reflect and to contemplate. All voices should be heard and should be given outlets. The session will discuss how conceptual learning and technology converge and how to create essential questions that require more than a Google search to answer.
The following will be shared:
This workshop gives teachers and administrators authentic ideas to integrate technology tools into every lesson and activity, no matter the subject! One major point made in this workshop is the discussion of “the real purpose” for technology, which is to connect and collaborate outside of the classroom. This workshop takes away the fear and burden teachers feel about using new technologies by empowering the students to explore and learn the tools that interest them.
Workshop includes:
A great partnership developed when I began to tweet. Four months after my first post, I developed friendships including one connecting four Iowa schools. Our classes joined together by student blogs. Students learned how to create blogs and how to comment appropriately. While the purpose in our classrooms varied, we were able to foster student interest through collaboration. This is only the beginning...
Join us as we discuss:
The challenge was to "Design an iPhone app that is useful to our school community." I used a challenge-based learning approach to inspire a group of beginning programmers to design questions, conduct guiding activities and find the resources they needed to invent a solution to a campus-wide problem. Along the way, I documented their thinking and used video and online tools to capture the story of how our app was published on the App Store and how this process transformed our classroom into a student-centered, fully collaborative learning environment.
Students as Teachers builds on the idea that learning can be solidified by teaching it to others and expands learning outside the classroom walls. I will share how we use flipcams in and out of the classroom as students create tutorial videos for a wide range of subjects and a wide range of viewers.
Attendees will:
This session will provide teachers and administrators the fundamentals of leadership that will develop them as education leaders in the classroom and throughout their school districts. It will focus on:
This session will provide concrete suggestions that school superintendents, principals, BOE members and technology coordinators can and should consider in their journey to Web 2.0 land. The workshop will offer suggestions of approaches for district leadership teams to incorporate into their system for Web 2.0 integration and engagement; there will be an emphasis on the structural, political and philosophical realities that must be challenged and accounted for.
The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a non-profit journalism organization, supports 50 high-quality, international reporting projects annually. These projects offer teachers classroom-friendly, multimedia material and lesson plans that can be used to infuse pressing global issues into the school curriculum. We will share how our collaboration with the Student News Action Network has encouraged students to explore critical global issues and their local implications.
Broughton Hall High School is part of the Building Schools for the Future Programme in the UK. The school has an international reputation for developing innovative approaches to curriculum design and skills based approaches to learning.
This has led to the following developments in recent years:
The focus of this session will be on the 'I's of introspection, inclusion, innovation and implementation in the development of a more relevant and engaging way of learning.
Google Apps for Education provides a free cross platform set of tools for educators. You can create Web sites, collect digital homework, manage student portfolios and much more. If your district has adopted Google Apps for Education, or is thinking about it, then this session is for you. Many districts have dived into Google Apps without a clear system for managing the digital work created there by teachers and students. We will walk through tips and tricks in setting up a Google Apps Domain and include real examples and best practices of how to utilize these tools in an educational setting.
Critical, dynamic thinkers are a “must-have” in today’s society, but how do we create such a thinker? Promethean’s Learner Response Systems allow us to engage every learner in any subject area with a higher-level thinking experience and immediate feedback. You will learn how to seamlessly incorporate Learner Response Systems into your classroom of kindergarteners to seniors in this hands-on session. You will also discover keywords to incorporate into your discussion questions that will evoke the most thought by challenging your learners to surpass their critical thinking potential!
The session will provide participants with tools to leverage technology for Character and Leadership Education. The session will focus on how the application of technology in the classroom can motivate students to use technology as a leadership tool across the curriculum. It will develop the core skills necessary for the integration of technology in the classroom.
Critical, dynamic thinkers are a “must-have” in today’s society, but how do we create such a thinker? Promethean’s Learner Response Systems allow us to engage every learner in any subject area with a higher-level thinking experience and immediate feedback. You will learn how to seamlessly incorporate Learner Response Systems into your classroom of kindergarteners to seniors in this hands-on session. You will also discover keywords to incorporate into your discussion questions that will evoke the most thought by challenging your learners to surpass their critical thinking potential!
Last year we described the mission, vision and rationale for the project: developing a model for educating K-12 and higher education students capable of succeeding in a flat and diverse globe. GTEC provides an alternative approach to developing the 21st century global workforce through a unique international mentorship and collaboration among K12, higher education and business/industry.
This year we will report on progress with two pilot programs. In the first program, students from Spirit of Knowledge Charter School, Worcester, MA, and Haywood Engineering College, UK, teamed up to create a ‘global classroom’ to solve an energy optimization problem. In the second program, Newburyport High School joined undergraduates from Olin College of Engineering in a problem-oriented co-design project to reclaim wasted energy. Both pilot programs received technical support from Parametric Technology Corporation, Needham, MA / UK.
Further discussion will include next steps involving additional partners abroad and at home.
Educators are inundated with buzzwords like 21st century skills and global education, but how do we bring them into the classroom effectively today? The Student News Action Network, an online high school journalism collaboration, in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, is building a network of kids around the world writing research-based journalism about topic-driven issues ranging from the March earthquake in Japan to the global water crisis to women’s rights in the Arab world. We will present a practical, scalable model for meaningful international student collaboration that teachers can use in the classroom immediately.
Few schools have the amount of technical support that they need, and one of the most overlooked technical resources schools have is the students! If you know teachers who are reluctant to use technology, a great way to encourage them is by using students as tech liaisons. The student learns by teaching and the teacher learns by listening. In this session, we will cover a variety of examples of how this is accomplished in a way that benefits everyone.
"Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand." (Author unknown)
This session will explore the basics of inquiry learning along with strategies and lessons learned while coaching a wide variety of teachers interested in incorporating inquiry-based learning tools into their teaching toolkit. Inquiry-based learning is a constructivist teaching approach that encourages students to generate and seek answers to their own questions as they construct new knowledge. Highly engaging and deeply meaningful - this style of teaching appeals to those seeking transformational learning opportunities for their students.
Shannon McClintock Miller
Eric Marcos
Lainie Rowell
Mike Pennington
Dan November
Liz B Davis
Brian Mull
Betty-Lou Ayers
Marcy Reed
Lainie Rowell
Dan November
Brian Mull
Gaby (Gabrielle) Richard-Harrington
Lorelle Allesio
Jennifer Beine Bowden
Angela Maiers
Shannon McClintock Miller
Eric Marcos
Lainie Rowell
Mike Pennington
Dan November
Glyn Barritt
Liz B Davis
Brian Mull
