Enter the Webinar World!

photo © 2010 Ben Lucier | more info (via: Wylio)

C’mon, don’t be shy…you have that laptop all up and running smoothly, you’d like to find some good professional development online, but where to start? Let me ask you to consider WEBINARS as a way to get in some great PD!

A webinar is an online presentation where a presenter shows slides, websites and online resources through a web-based application like Elluminate, GoToMeeting, Bridgit, etc. Participants can interact with the presenter and with each other through chat, microphone, telephone and even video depending on the webinar set-up.

Webinars are a great way for teachers to attend to specific PD opportunities or even specific student learning needs. You can attend webinars live and in archived fashion. I find that not only is the webinar a great learning experience but the chat area is always chalked full of participant ideas, resources and experiences.

There are many educational organizations that offer webinars. I am focusing on TWO today:

1) ERLC

In Alberta, there are seven educational consortiums that work with school divisions to facilitate F2F, online VC and webinar PD sessions. Edmonton Regional Learning Consortium is one such organization that I am very thankful to associate with.

They host a variety of assessment to technology integration webinars throughout the year. Many of these webinars are archived – see HERE.

One such set of webinars that I am really excited about are the Making a Difference series. The Making a Difference: Meeting Diverse Learning Needs with Differentiated Instruction is an Alberta Education publication that works through an intro to DI to developing learning profiles to assessment and even leveraging technology in the classroom. It’s a comprehensive guide for administrators and teachers trying to understand how to effectively implement Differentiated Instruction in the classroom. From this publication, ERLC hosted several webinars and from these webinars, Conversation Guides were created. Check out the great resources for Making a Difference HERE. (I am excited to say that I was part of the trio that designed these guides.)

Within the archived webinars area, you will also see on the left hand side a “filter by focus” section. Please use this to further target a specific area of interest. Archived webinars are free and live webinars are reasonably priced.

 

 

2) SCHOOLS MOVING UP

In my role as Educational Technology Facilitator, I associate with a variety of educational organizations. I receive offers, RSS feeds, emails from a number of organizations on a daily basis. One such organization that I am impressed with is the SchoolsMoving Up group. They also offer a variety of webinars, resources and links.

SchoolsMovingUp offers live and archived webinars on key curricular concepts, RTI, Differentiated Instruction, etc. Check out their upcoming and archived webinars HERE. Whether it’s a live or archived webinar, the cost is free. They even offer Tips for Viewing Archived Webinars.

Overall, webinars offer another PD opportunity to enhance, engage and empower administrators and teachers in the important work with students. Whether you participate in LIVE webinars or in your PJ’s with ARCHIVED webinars, being able to effectively target your own PD needs using a webinar format is a good thing!

If you have any other educational organizations in mind that offer exciting webinars, please add them to the comment area below!

 

Using Technology to Support Diverse Learners

photo © 2005 Curtis Palmer | more info (via: Wylio)

For this EPSB workshop that I was able to partake in (I’m from a school division on the outskirts of this larger one) listening to the sage advice from Dave Edyburn who gave us four items to think about:

1) How the use of technology can enhance learning, teaching and performance.

2) How UDL and DI can support teachers in meeting the needs of diverse learners.

3) How ATL can be part of the RTI process.

4) Connecting Setting the Direction to all of the above.

Last week, participants were sent two short articles to read in preparation of this PD session. I must admit that I had not heard of Dave Edyburn before this time, yet his work is so important to where Alberta is working towards that I relished in this opportunity to soak in everything he was to say and has said.

The first article was from JSET 2009 Volume 24, Number 1 entitled Hindsight, Understanding What We Got Wrong, and Changing Directions. It’s a brief article outlining 10 assistive technology thoughts that Dave revisits and recritiques. Overall I enjoyed this read since I am able to gauge Dave’s process of redefining his work with Assistive Technologies in the education world.

The second article is from Learning & Leading with Technology, September 2006, provactively titled ‘Failure is not an Option’. Once again, Dave speaks to the inadequate use of technology tools and cognitive supports for students in schools. The profession as a whole, Dave says, must design authentic learning activities (and in our school division’s AISI case – critical thinking activities) to ensure successful and deeper learning.

Dave’s a jovial guy and presented us with a variety of information, graphs, and topics. You can check out my full set of notes HERE if you wish to read further! A question he posed on the onset of his talk was that “if we are aware of learner differences, what will it take to ensure that diverse learners have the supports they need to be successful?” (Actually this sounds like a great #edchat conversation! And I focused my thoughts during this day on this overarching question.)
- Our students are all at different levels of reading abilities, handwriting legibility (keyboarding skills), attention spans, persistence, numeracy skills.
- One-size-fits-all teacher lesson plan books do not thoughtfully and deliberately respond to the needs of diverse learners.
- Looking at the performance level of a student (graph was shown), how much failure data do we need before he/she knows they cannot do it and when should a teacher intervene. (Discussion ensued and research abounds that there should be no more than 3 days of ‘failure’ for an intervention to take place or a re-direction in learning to occur. (Refer to Failure is not an Option article mentioned above.)
- In order to achieve high academic outcomes for ALL, we must understand AND RESPOND to the needs of EACH.

Several theories provide inspiration and insight on design tactics that provide access, choice, challenge, and engagement for diverse learners.

- Some initiatives explained were: RTI, AT, IT, UDL.
- Pedagogical intervations were: Goldilocks/Sone of Proximal Development, Tiered Instruction and Assessment, DI, Tomlinson’s Sliders.
- Instructional Design – some good practices for teachers looking to plan for diversity:
o TIC TAC TOE – populate the grid with products that you will accept to demonstrate the learning outcome. Assists teachers in thinking as an “instructional designer” rather than a lecturer or sage on the stage – good examples for various subject areas.
o 42 Explore – accessibility for all levels on various topics
o UDL Toolkit – an online resource for teachers interested in e-tools and online resources that can give flexibility and accessibility for all learners.
o Internet4Classrooms – has an updated website filled with subject area weblinks.
o KidsClick is a web search site vetted by librarians. Very neat.
o Wikipedia – did you know that on the left sidebar you can select SIMPLE English to make Wikipedia a little easier to read for struggling readers? Cool! As well, students themselves can populate the Simple English pages. Why not have them look up a topic on Wikipedia and see if there is a Simple English category already written up for it. If there isn’t, why couldn’t this be a written assignment for them? Talk about authentic learning!!
o Readibility is a great toolbar bookmarklet that allows students to customize their web reading experience. I wrote about this on our SLItech blog earlier last year so it’s nice to see that Dave and others like this too!
o TextCompactor is a cool instantaneous summarization tool that I definitely will recommend to teachers. It allows students to paste text into a box and the students slide between 0% – 100% as to the amount of text they want to read.
o VozMe was shown as a Text to Speech tool but I wasn’t impressed with its limited functionality and ‘ugly’ voice overs. We use Read and Write Gold as well as Natural Reader which sound more human-like.
o Google has a number of options like Google Docs for collaborating with others, Google Scribe which a very interesting tool that offers suggestions as you type (and you can use it as a bookmarklet to use anywhere there are text boxes.
o Hot Paper Topics was of interest to me where students (and teachers) can look at targeting their position or persuasive essays and research reports. Well worth the look!
o The Assignment Calculator is a really neat tool to keep you organized. Everything is laid in step by step fashion. Try it out!

A commitment to diverse learners results in the provision of tools that scaffold and support academic performance of diverse learners.

Fairness means that each student receives the supports they need to be successful.

How will you evaluate and report on the impact of new instructional design interventions?

I also appreciated the after lunch panel with school admin, teachers and students sharing their stories of learning with technology and customized instructional strategies.

As well, once I have a moment I also plan on viewing Dave’s recent webinar on UDL.

Overall, this PD day gave some good food for thought, some more reflection on how my school division can further intervene and invest a strategic effort into creating a learning environment conducive to all learners. More to come!

 

The Blogging Continuum

I really am in love with my PLN. Yes; my professional learning network on twitter is just the best. It’s amazing what you learn, share, analyze, create, connect, invent, collaborate, explore and even observe in the twitterverse.

Last week some of my PLN were discussing a blogging scope and sequence. Doug Pete was commenting on the importance of assessing student blogs and developing a criteria if blogging is part of the class. Kim Cofino also shows some wonderful teacher/student examples of rubrics, ideas and even a collaborative document for anyone to edit!  Further to this, make sure to check out Will Richardson’s book – Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom. I know our school division’s resource centre has a copy that I bought last year. It’s a great resource for teachers who are intimidated by integrating technology or those who would like more practice classroom examples so they feel more comfortable in integrating this into their classroom on a more regular basis.

After all of this reading, I wasn’t satisfied with the blogging scope and sequences that I had found. Although enlightening, and a reminder that I too, need to work at my ‘complex blogging’ status, I started to play with a Blogging Continuum. Here’s my visual in draft version:

Let me know what you think and for those of you who blog or work with students who blog, happy blogging and learning!

 

How Should Critical Thinking Be Integrated with Technology?

This question was the topic of discussion on yesterday’s first #edchat discussion on Twitter. (Or follow through the Educator’s PLN Ning.) Although I was quite engaged in other matters, I was able to peruse the discussions archived on the wiki which was helpful. It provided an opportunity to see the variety of ways we THINK about critical thinking.  I agree with @cybraryman1’s comment that “good teaching requires an understanding of how technology relates to the pedagogy and content (see my #5.) As well, @Parentella makes the statement that “it requires critical thinking skills and problem solving to be able to function in the world we live in” whereby I give out a rebel yell ‘ YES!!’ and come down to reality. The way schools are structured in learning silos must be disintegrated. Reform is not the way, a learning revolution MUST take place in order for a majority of our schools to change the way they are educating students. (Check out my blog on The 21^st Century Learning Environment and even Sir Ken Robinson’s Bring on the Learning Revolution TED talk.)

Here’s my own path towards critical thinking:

1)      I have had various teachers and mentors who have facilitated my own immersion into critical thinking.

2)      The  definition of critical thinking from Dictionary.com’s 21st Century Lexicon cites that it is the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion.

3)      With the above definition in mind, I have even had an opportunity to work on the newer Bloom’s Taxonomy by giving it a digital addendum. (See my SLItech blog.)

4)      I recently have been exposed to TC² which is part of our AISI (Alberta Initiative for School Improvement) three year project. Critical thinking, according to TC², is concerned with developing sound judgment. Teachers need to guide students to think critically through various forms of learning. Developing criteria to judge a particular project, instructing strategies to organize thinking and acquiring a vocabulary about thinking are some of the necessary activities to build critical knowledge and skills.

5)      Finally, let’s talk tech. Being a BIG supporter of the TPACK model, I believe that critically thinking will involve some form of technology. If this isn’t clear, check out Judi Harris’ wiki with learning activity types which offers a way for teachers to deliberately plan their lessons with technology if they so wish. Now, add some critical challenges, investigation of images, ask some powerful questions and you have started on your way! (Sounds easy, but take little steps like concentrating on one form of critical thinking first) As well, our own K-12 Alberta Social Studiescurriculum  is smattered with critical thinking possibilities to assist teachers.

Critical thinking is a lifelong learning process and I am certainly glad to be part of the experiences in our school division. I can thank Leah, Diane (our curriculum facilitators) and Wally (TC²) for that!

Image http://darcott.com/blog/img/Diana_06-04-12_AHrHT3.jpg