AJ Huff – Coordinator of school community public relations

The Senior Experience
- class

What
- 21st century teaching and learning
- language arts credit
- students apply, 6 students in class
- blog about their senior year.
- Also go to the other buildings
- They get a MacBook
- Digital camera this year
- Taught to be responsible with social media
- Real life experience. Work in the administration offices during class period

Student videos

The project is the 4 Cs.

Why did we need the senior experience?
- additional help
- Social media experience
- Main Street Madison – parent lead public forum. People were visiting it for information instead of going to the school’s website.

The plan:
- First year the students were hand picked for the pilot.
- Wanted it to be part of the main website
- want video and pictures in the blog
- promoting the seniors
- highlight videos

How is it evaluated
- Students are earning language arts credit
- students still have to take senior English
- problem based learning
- website hits
- a lot less misconceptions posted on main street Madison
- track top pages on site, blogs are consistently in the top 10

People do want to hear about the academics

Risks
- safety: signed aup, contract, loan agreement for equipment,
- Money: permanent improvement funds,
- Responsibility: AJ Huff

“Don’t be afraid to take risks, especially smart ones. ” – Steve Jobs

Q: did you have to turn people away the 2nd year?
A: received a list of 40 recommendations from the English dept. Widdowed it down to 20, then discussed with the principal. 12 were asked to apply, of which 10 did.

Q: comments are blocked on the blogs, what about the FB page?
A: FB page is new, but hopefully can turn negative comments to positive.

Q: Any plans to open it to others?
A: not at this time

Q: How did you come up with 6?
A: Original plan was they would be paired, because they work unsupervised in the office.

Q: How will you use Facebook?
A: Ultimate goal is to still drive traffic back to the website.

Q: How often do the students post?
A: In the beginning they tried 1 to 2 times a week, but that became an issue with all the other projects. Now it’s around once every 7-10 days.

Q: How do you handle their personal FB pages?
A: That’s really outside of the jurisdiction of the school.

Q: How much do you change their articles?
A: Quick edits, try not to change the message. Did have a problem with one post, student talked about the whole family going to Florida for spring break.

Q: Controversal issues in the school?
A: Situation hasn’t come up

Mississinawa Valley Local school district
- Pilot school for eDays

Replace snow days with eDays?
- ancedotes: take away sled time? Big learning experience

Background/History
- Supt. brought in through a video
- Learning can continue when the instructor can’t be in front of the students
- District covers 80 square miles, miss days after snowfall due to wind
- Superintendent Wendel formalizes plan that is used as a basis for the house bill
- House bill dies, could be due to lobbying from the AFT
- Applied for waiver days from the ODE to try it out.
- Big response from across the nation, spent a lot of time in interviews
- Governor Kasich re-institutes the 5 calamity days and adds 3 online days to the budget bill

School plan
- Teachers are already required to come in two days in the summer. One was used for eDay PD
- The other day was used to complete lessons
- Teachers were paid for two days, but more was put in on their own time.
- Prepare students and parents. Teachers took class time to show the students, parent meetings in the evening in an open computer lab
- Variety of lessons, and a student product (an assignment and assessment)

eLesson Components
- Target
Pick some standards that are hard to hit in the classroom due to other standards
- Instruction
Reading
Podcasts
Vodcasts
- Teacher contact information
–Duplicate the learning that occurs in a normal day

Lesson types
- Rubric was used to grade the lesson: Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced
- Everyone was required to have a Basic lesson, but the goal was for the teachers to move to intermediate and/or advanced lesson plans
- Component of an eDay Lesson: Student Tasks, Student Product
- See Darke County ESC for rubric

What happens on an eDay
- Teachers/students notified
- Teaches enable lessons, using First Class
- Teachers will be available for consilt during day either by phone or email
- Students have 2 weeks to complete assignments if needed

What if students don’t have internet?
- Initial survey showed that only 11% did not have Internet, 50% free/reduced lunches
- Discuss with students ahead of time
- Weather permitting:
• Community building open with laptops and tech coordinator
• School building will be open
- 2 week window to complete assignments
• Work on them during non-instructional times of school day
• After school hours

Sample Pages
- First class

WHERE IS MOODLE? GOOGLE DOCS?

- Teacher is usually online to assist during the day
- Only open up the current eDay’s lesson, didn’t want students to complete all the eday work on the first day

WHY NOT? IF THEY CAN COMPLETE IT SUCCESSFULLY, WHY NOT LET THEM COMPLETE IT ALL?

- issues that cropped up: lessons took too much time, computer sharing in households with multiple students
- Teachers learned a lot of what works and what doesn’t work the first year
- Found out some students only had dial-up, video was difficult

NICE USE OF A DIGITAL CAMERA TO “SCAN” IN PAGES TO PUT ON A WEBPAGE

- Lessons are stand alone

I HOPE THEY AREN’T TEACHING SKILLS IN ISOLATION, THEY SHOULD BUILD SOMEWHAT ON THE FIRST HALF OF THE YEAR (MAKE UP DAYS WOULDN’T BE UNTIL ALL CALAMATY DAYS ARE EXHAUSTED, WHICH WOULDN’T BE UNTIL JAN OR FEB).

- Surfing the Internet took a lot a time because there is so much stuff out there. Actually inspired the teacher to integrate other resources that were found.
- Elementary PE: Timed sit-ups, push-ups, and measure reach.

NO SHOVELING SNOW?

- Teacher’s daughter wanted to do some of the activities after the eDay ended

Statistic Comparisons
- 100% of the teachers believed their eLessons were of high instructional value
- 72% of the students said they were able to learn by completing the eLessons
- 80% of the parents thought the lessons were of high instructional value
- 52% of the students said the learning equaled what they learn on a “regular” day, 60% of parents
- 100% of teachers, 57% of students, 67% of parents believed the school should continue the eDay program
- Older siblings liked helping the younger students complete some of their tasks

Lessons Learned
- Too much time between the actual eDay and when they are due. More information and tasks were given than what would have been given in a normal class period
- Students were frustrated in the completion of the lesson and the time it took
- Students are passive learners
- There should be no athletic practices during school time on eDays
- Parents view parental involvment as something that occurs inside the school
- Incorporate this type of technology throughout the year
- Online time cannot equal chair time
- Automated system for product return is necassary
– Need a consistent, agreed upon method for student/teacher communication
- Lack of completion consequences needs to be more fully developed
- More parent/student prep needed
- Need to have a contingency plan before you need the contengency plan

COULD AN EDAY BE USED TO ALLOW TEACHERS PD DAYS THROUGHOUT THE YEAR?

CONTIGENCY PLAN FOR SERVER ISSUES?

Q/A
Q:How do you deal with students special needs?
A: Modified classroom teacher lessons

Q: How did you structure your pilot?
A: 100% of the teachers involved, followed the steps listed above

Q: If two weeks are too long, are you going to change? Do teachers prepare lessons for each subject in self-contained classrooms?
A: Havent approached the two week window. Teachers create lessons for each subject.

Q: Moodle?
A: Looking at it.

Q: Costs?
A: Practically nothing, since First Class was already in place. Already had days in place for PD. Probably 4 or 5 hours for each lesson. Research takes time

Q: Union buy in?
A: Union and administration identified the need and mutually agreed to it. No one wanted to be there mid-June. Waiver days gave them two additional days at Christmas.

Q: No computer?
A: Places open for computer use, and two weeks to have things done.

Q: Outside of snow days, such as no electricity due to winds/ice.
A: Discuss as a district.

Q: Is there a real problem with students working ahead?
A: It depends on the teachers and how the lesson was designed. What’s in their lessons, how it’s set up.

Q: How did you report this to the state department?
A: The survey data was reported to the state, along with the waivers for the eDays.

Comment: Mt. Vernon had a day without electricity, so they just used the two weeks to get the work completed.

Teachers in elementary use Moodle and theme lessons.

photo credit: davidsilver

This article started out as the top ten skills needed to use technology effectively, but as I wrote the list, I realized that technology shouldn’t be separated out. As we proclaim that technology is a tool, we also shouldn’t single it out when talking about what skills it takes to educate. The following list has a few items that are somewhat related to technology, the others are what I view as important skills any teacher needs to have if they want to succeed. Successful teachers will not find any surprises in this list.

1. mastery of your subject – If you don’t know your subject, your students will learn that rather quickly. You must know what you’re teaching, backwards and forwards. There are no shortcuts here. If you cannot answer a student’s question, use your searching skills to find the answer as quickly as possible.

2. classroom management – Whether it’s your morning math meeting or working in small groups, you will not have a successful class if you cannot manage it.

3. Your students don’t know as much as you think they do, and you know more then they think you do – There are a few phrases that have gained some popularity in the past couple of years that I disagree with. The impression that teachers are digital immigrants and students are digital natives is an incorrect assumption. Most students do not know as much as their teachers when it comes to using technology. And teachers do know more about technology then they realize. The personal computer is over 30 years old, for a majority of teachers this is longer then their teaching career. They’ve seen how technology has changed some classrooms, and can leverage that experience in their own classroom.

4. Ability to punt – Your day to day classroom will probably never work exactly as you pictured it in your mind, and your ability to punt and do something different is imperative. Supplies for a science experiment hasn’t arrived? Prepare to punt. Internet access down? Punt!

5. Keeping an open mind – “Those who say it can’t be done, are usually interrupted by someone doing it”

6. Understand cheap, fast or easy, pick any two – This is a phrase I use when talking to administrators when they wonder why something isn’t working the way they thought it should. The phrase basically means, you can only two out of the three items. For example, if you want it cheap and easy, it’s not going to be fast. Or if you want it fast and easy, it isn’t going to be cheap.

7. Know how to search – Learn the shortcuts for how to include and exclude search terms. Find out how to search for a particular filetype. If you need a presentation on the water cycle, learn how to search for one (with google use “filetype:ppt” as a search term).

8. Embracing life-long learning – Anything you learn today will be out of date before you retire. We don’t have to sharpen our quills anymore, or learn how to make dittos. Be prepared to learn every day.

9. Creating a personal learning network – Seek out like minded teachers as yourself. Email them, follow their blog, follow them on Twitter. Create your own blog and Twitter account. Learn to share.

10. Owning a home computer – I am totally surprised at the number of teachers that do not own a home computer. The new netbooks are priced at under $400 and desktops around the same price, so price isn’t much of an obstacle. If you can’t afford to buy, check out your local Freecycle or Craigslist for people looking at getting rid of older computers.

Anything I missed?

A new law that takes effect next fall requires every district in the state to set up an online school for kindergarten through eighth-grade students.

This is fascinating to me, and I’m surprised that this didn’t get more news coverage when the legislation was being passed in Florida. Each district still gets the $6,000 per student, and most are going to buy the services of a couple of companies that provide online education instead of create their own online curriculum. Even the computer and Internet connection are provided to the students.

I could see this being a watershed moment in the aspect of educational technology. Can education be provided digitally and will students learn just as well as they do in a classroom of 20 students? The pitfalls are enormous, mostly centering around socialization skills, although this should be a solved problem with the years of home schooling that have taken place. In the spring of 2003, 1,096,000 students were being home schooled in the United States.

(* Thanks to Kevin Jarrett and his tweet! *)

We already had one case of student to teacher generated e-mail that originated on a student computer inside the school. The FIRST question I got as the Tech Director was ‘Why are you allowing students to send and receive email in school?’

And my question would be, “Why are you letting them use pencil and paper? They could be sending notes to other students or staff!”. For discipline we do not distinguish between computer generated or person generated correspondence. The punishment may change if it’s on the computer because they’d lose computer privileges due to the AUP.

You’re not going to be able to stop it. A student could simply fire up telnet and use your existing mail server to send email to whoever they want, saying anything they want.

No access to telnet on the machine? Then throw up a Java telnet client on any old web host and access it from there. Actually, if I wanted to get around a school’s filters, this is the route I’d probably go. Once I get SSH somewhere, I can get full access to the Internet, and it only requires port 80, a web browser, and Java. (This is what I use at places that have network access locked down. I open a SSH tunnel over port 443 to my home computer, and then have full access to anything on the Internet.)

Not only is email use part of the State of Ohio Technology Standards, it is our job as teachers to educate the students on the proper use of email. How to use it, what’s appropriate, etc. Part of the problem with the garbage that students send through email is that they’ve never seen anything else. It’s pretty foreign for them to see an email message with proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. (I hope I have everything correct in this post!

I bet you have students right now using a free email services, ssh tunnels, etc.

We like to think we have things locked down, but unless you’re working for the NSA, you do not have it locked down. Education of the students, punishment for inappropriate behavior is a good way to go. We as Technology Coordinators we have a habit of putting up technological road blocks instead of solving the real problems.

Thunderbird Email

photo credit: swperman

I found one company that already is thinking this way, Pocket Mobility with their Quizzler Pro product. Me on the other hand, loves the challenge of coding something up myself.

Has anyone worked with ISRSs? What did you like? What didn’t you like? Is this something I should look at as a summer project?

Over the course of the film, movie-watchers influence one another and gradually synchronize their emotional responses. This mutual mimicry also affects each participant’s evaluation of the overall experience — the more in sync we are with the people around us, the more we like the movie.

Can this research be applied to the classroom? We’ve all taught at least one lesson where it seems like everything clicked. The students were engaged, on task, and excited. Even the most prepared teacher can have a lesson go south, but it appears that a lesson might be saved by “groupthink”. By slowly bringing the class on task, it can cause a snowball effect, not only increasing the enjoyment of the students but also increasing their retention.

I’m reminded of this post by Miguel Guhlin

In my early years of working with adult learners, I facilitated a workshop that was everyone’s nightmare class–a cafeteria technology inservice. In the morning, provide inspiring words about using technology. In the afternoon, hands-on tutorial. The morning went well since we had cooperative grouping, activities, etc. The afternoon was focused on how-to, but I had some physical education coaches that whipped out newspapers. I was supremely irritated and felt powerless. It was my first solo workshop for the Education Service Center, and I wasn’t sure what to do…if I’d been working as a school district facilitator, I know exactly what I would have done–I’d asked them to leave. Instead, I put up with them.

Although a teacher can’t “fire” their students, a teacher needs to be aware of the negative influence those off-task students are having on the rest of the class.

In this lesson, students write encyclopedia articles focusing on topics in American history. They practice fact checking, assess their own ability to read actively and skeptically, and write memos that educate others on how to do so.