Feedback was overwhelmingly positive and there were requests to do this again next year. Below are two videos that sum up each day's experience for me.
The Ed Techs and IP"s tried something brand new in their summer PD this week. After having sent out a survey to teachers about what they were looking for in PD, it became apparent that what most staff wanted was time to collaborate with their peers. Given that information, we began to envision what that would look like and we came up with TESLA. Teachers came up with their own agenda on Day 1 and the IP's and Ed Techs facilitated conversations on the selected topics. The day was broken up by our Spark Sessions. Each teacher could choose three 30 minute sessions to attend in the two days that we spent together. Topics ranged from Morning Meetings to the latest tips and tricks for the new teacher iPad Air 2s. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive and there were requests to do this again next year. Below are two videos that sum up each day's experience for me.
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This year's visitors were from 2 different schools in San Antonio and were an absolute pleasure to host. We tried a different approach this year which I think was really successful. Three of our wonderful EE teachers agreed to showcase their students' iPad expertise by allowing us to spend 30 minutes in their rooms asking questions and listening to students explain their work. Each teacher took a different approach and all 3 were equally as wonderful.
The last room we visited was Erin Krieger's GT classroom where the students were in the process of making stop motion videos as a culminating activity for a research project on whales. At the end of the day, both Natalie Brewer and Erin Krieger were able to join teachers from BridgePoint Elementary and Hill Country Middle School on a panel where they answered questions posed by the iLeap Participants.
3. We moved on to the 2nd page where we typed "I am..." and drew a picture of what we are. I was impressed with their ability to stick with this challenging task and to come up with some wonderful products. Here are a few more pictures from today. Samples from Mrs. Worley and Ms. Champ's Kinder ClassesMore Samples from First Grade!Ms. Smith had her class use Book Creator to share their Shape Poems. This conference simply gets better every year as far as the depth and breadth of the presenters that are selected. There are no gimmicks, no tech how-to's, only an abundance of inspiration, creativity, and innovation. The real power for me in this conference is attending it with people from my campus. We come to the conference with the advantage of sharing a campus mission and a common language which makes conversations deeper and more meaningful. The Instructional Partner on our campus, Kelly Van Meter, and I spent a good deal of time in the same sessions which allowed us to listen for and share in conversations about concepts that would be appropriate for us to share with our campus. As powerful as that collaborative experience is, even more powerful was spending time debriefing with the two teachers that attended this year, Kaley Coffield and Aimee Smith. Kelly and I have made it a tradition to kick off the week with breakfast at Maria's Taco Stand complete with discussions about which sessions we are most looking forward to. We try to meet up for lunches when we can and we schedule a debrief at the end of the convention as our culminating event. I am always so impressed with the profound effect that this conference has on the teachers we share it with. Aimee told us that she feels like she spends her days between 4 walls with 22 students, but for this week she got to see the world. I wish that all of our teachers could share in this type of experience. I am really enjoying using the iPad app, Paper 53, to Sketchnote my conference notes. Visible Thinking keeps me focused during the sessions and I have found that I retain information far better than if I had simply typed the notes. Here are some of my notes from the conference. EE Principal, Lesley Ryan and I, have spent a lot of time this school year delving into Visible Thinking/Sketchnoting in its various forms. Lesley is a wonderful mentor. She is incredibly creative and positive and has been the perfect teacher/encourager for me in this endeavor. I started this journey very much with the attitude that I was not at all artistic so how could I take this on? With Lesley's help, I have made some real progress in overcoming my fears and having more of a growth mindset about this. So a couple of months ago, we decided we wanted to try this out in a classroom. We started with Third Grade and then once we became more confident, we offered it up to other grade levels. Here is a little bit about what we are doing in these classrooms.
We incorporate a lot of Lesley's Sketchnotes into our presentation and are trying to incorporate more student and teacher created pieces. This one was created by one of our Fourth Grade teachers, Natalie Brewer.
The Elementary Ed Techs did a training on our campus last week in which we used Nearpod to present information on Visible Thinking. While giving an overview of the basics of Sketchnoting, we took time to point out the features of Nearpod that we had incorporated in the presentation. Two very positive things happened this week as a result of that training. One was an increase in Nearpod usage across the campus due to a new awareness of the features that teachers have access to now based on their upgraded status as District Users. The second is the way in which teachers have embraced the idea of using Visible Thinking with students. Here is a perfect example. Elizabeth Dodge and Mary Ann Simmons have begun to use Sketchnoting in two ways that had never occurred to me before. 1. In FIT, when students are given passages to read, they are having them read a paragraph and then draw a quick picture of what that paragraph is mainly about. Elizabeth told me that the results were fairly amazing as the students could quickly go back and look at their drawing and know exactly what the main idea of that paragraph was. She said that it was way more effective than the practice of simply underlining and circling key words in a paragraph. 2. 5th Graders are doing a novel study on Hatchet now and at times the students read along in their own books as the teacher is reading out loud. Mary Ann and Elizabeth decided to use Sketchnoting as a way to help students stay engaged and retain more of the information they were reading. They gave each student one of the larger varieties of Post-it notes and asked them to sketch the important details in the chapters they were reading. Mary Ann reported that when one student was asked to explain to a student who had been absent the day before what the previous chapter was about, he simply pulled out his Sketchnote and began to retell the chapter with great clarity and detail. I am including two samples for you to look at! Chapter 8 in HatchetSketchnoting the Details in ParagraphsNatalie Brewer shared this book with her 4th Graders recently. Each page discusses the feet of a different animal and how those feet function to help the animal survive. Students then chose an animal and wrote a brief narrative about what their day would be like if they woke up with that animal's feet. Another part of the assignment was to use Pages to make a photo that combined their own body with the feet of the animal they were writing about. I modeled the process for them and they were off! Take a look at some of the examples below! Last week, 10 staff members from Eanes Elementary traveled to Arizona for Solution Tree's Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) at Work Institute. During the day, we attended sessions and Keynotes and each evening we gathered to debrief the day. The conversations during those evenings that the 10 of us had began with questions to use as starting points and quickly developed into wonderful discussions about education in general and the PLC work being done on our campus in specific.
We are returning to our campus as a Leadership Coalition, armed with in depth knowledge of the PLC process and ready to begin the work of sharing that knowledge with our staff. Perhaps the most profound emotional reaction to the conference that I had was the result of the Keynote by Richard Dufour. According to his bio on the Solution Tree site DuFour is... "A prolific author and sought-after consultant, he is recognized as one of the leading authorities on helping school practitioners implement the Professional Learning Communities at Work™ process in their schools and districts." In addition, DuFour is dying of lung cancer, a fact that he revealed during his Keynote. He looked frail and frequently had to pause to recover from a coughing spell, yet he continues to travel the United States spreading his passion for the PLC process in spite of the limited time he has left on this earth. Nothing I have heard over the last 5 years of delving into this process has convinced me more that PLCs are worthy of the time and effort that our District is putting into it. Was he paid to be there? Of course! However, I think that all of us could agree that passion is what drives him at this point. He could be at home spending time with family and friends and yet he chooses this rather exhausting life of traveling and speaking and sharing his vast first hand knowledge of the PLC process. My hope for all of us is that we find a passion like DuFour's at some point in our lives. Here are the notes that I took during each of the sessions. I used an app called Paper 53 to take notes throughout the conference, not the Sketchnoting app that I generally use, but one that people rave about. I really liked it. The one downside that I found was that you can only add one photo to each page. That could be a perception based on user error and if so and you are reading this and know how to make that happen, please let me know! I had the pleasure of working with Shannon Foley, Librarian Extraordinaire at Cedar Creek Elementary School, for several years as an Ed Tech. I learned way more from Shannon about technology than she ever learned from me and she helped to make my transition into Eanes ISD as an Ed Tech a wonderful experience. This week, Shannon invited me to her library see the EduDisplay in action. We are looking into purchasing one of these for our library and I wanted to get a clearer picture of what its potential was. Below is the information that I gathered from my visit. Here is a diagram of some of the parts of the system. Some of the pluses are: 1. It has its own built in hard drive so it is an awesome combination of computer and doc camera with the option for iPads to be connected as well. 2. It comes with software that is very much like the SMART Notebook software which allows you to have on-screen interactivity. For the project that I observed today at Cedar Creek, students each researched a different president. They transformed their notes into a short speech as if they were the president introducing themselves to the class in the form of a Chatterpix video. Shannon used the doc cam to project a book of poems called "Rutherford B., Who Was He? Poems about Our Presidents" and after she read each poem, the student assigned to that president shared their Chatterpix project. Here are some photos and a video from today. Oh how I love the power of Social Media. Here is an example. Laura Wright, Third Grade Teacher at Eanes Elementary and the 2016 Iditarod Teacher on the Trail, is a believer of growing her Personal Learning Network by connecting with people via Twitter. One of the people that she has connected with is Erik Brooks, an author and illustrator whose inspiration is the Arctic and its animals, particularly polar bears. Erik lived in Alaska for about 9 years and it left an impression. The fact that Laura leaves at the end of February to go to Alaska to join the mushers on the Iditarod Trail as a representative of students and teachers across the country, means that she has spent a great deal of time exploring all aspects of the state of Alaska, including children's literature on the subject. She made a connection with Erik's publisher - Sasquatch Books - which led her to sending a tweet to Erik. Once that contact was made, Laura concocted a plan to have Erik come and visit our campus and our PTO loved that idea so much that they decided to fund not only his presentations to K-2 and 3-5, but also an additional 2 days during which he would work with all grade levels in their art classes. So, on Monday, Erik met with all students K-5 in the cafeteria and shared his stories and his artwork. The students (and teachers) were enthralled. I have been in this business for a long time and I don't think that I have ever seen such a gifted presenter. His pacing, his management of the crowd and his choice of activities were beyond compare. See below for some photos of the assemblies. One of my favorite parts of his presentation was towards the end when he began to talk about his move into digital art. He is using both Brushes and Photoshop to produce some of his art work these days. Here are some samples. For the rest of the day Monday and all day Tuesday and Wednesday, Erik moved to one of the art rooms where he answered questions and presented a hands on art lesson to every single class K-5. I can't say enough about the quality of this investment by our PTO. It is something we will all remember for a very long time. We are all better writers and thinkers because of it. |
Debbie Smith
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