approx  read time: 2 min.
Wouldn’t it be great if you had a coach with you in the classroom whenever you wanted? You know, someone who watches you play your game, and then helps you adjust your technique. 

Imagine you got a great idea from a blog post, Twitter chat or conference workshop over the weekend. You’re going to try it out Monday. Wouldn’t it be great if someone else could be there to watch and give you some feedback, engage in some reflection? Someone who knows the learning targets, but is free to watch the action unfold rather than be caught up in facilitating? 

Or maybe you have a tried and true activity that could use a refresh. It flows wonderfully, but you want to build on it and take it to the next level. Unfortunately, when one is engaged in facilitating the lesson, opportunities to observe and learn as a teacher are few and far between.

One way to see it all is with the use of a tool like Swivl. This little robotic video stand offers a great option to observe and reflect on your practice. You can either set it in a convenient spot and let it go, or you can wear the marker and have it follow you around as you speak. Upload your video and watch at your leisure. And if you choose, you can invite others to comment by sharing your video. You can expand this out to filming students as they work individually, in small groups or presenting. Share clips with students as exemplars. Using Swivl is an easy way to step into using the ISTE educator standards as you strive to increase modeling, collaboration, and student choice. Use Swivl to: 

• (Learner) Continually improve your practice and explore proven and promising practices that leverage technology to improve student learning.
• (Leader) Model for colleagues 
• (Citizen) Establish a culture of learning that fosters digital literacy 
• (Collaborator) Collaborate & co-learn with students and colleagues to discover and use new technologies to create authentic learning experiences. 
• (Designer) Leverage technology to foster student voice and accommodate various learning needs. 
• (Facilitator) Manage the use of technology and student learning strategies.
• (Analyst) Use technology to design and implement a variety of formative and summative assessments. 

The return on investment for Swivl is excellent. At the time of this post, it retails for about $600. That’s a fantastic price point for next year’s school budget. It’s also an easy sell for a site like Donors Choose.  And if you’re really feeling adventurous, write a mini-grant to cover the cost. Most mini-grants are big enough to cover 2 or a few extra markers that you can use to maximize the benefits. 
Leave a comment below to share how you’ve used Swivl or other video coaching methods to improve teaching and learning. 

Headed to MACUL18 this week? Me too!  And you're cordially invited to any one (or all) of my three great sessions!

Thursday from 3-430 take a deeper dive into Google mapping tools; Earth, Tour Builder, My Maps & Lit Trips, at my What a Wonderful World session. Follow this link to a one page handout with session description and resources. 

Friday I'll be presenting  Formative Assessment by Design. This talk highlights the role of formative assessment and some of tech tools you can use to support empowering learners and  create lessons targeted to the individual needs of each student. Follow this link for complete session description and handout. 

Friday afternoon I'm back at it from 1-2 co-presenting with physics teacher extraordinaire, Elizabeth Maitner  from Catholic Central high school.  Elizabeth is  sharing a project she did with students in which they applied for a grant and used the funds to build a drone! Not trained in project-based learning, this project developed organically when she told the kids, "if you want to do this, we need funding and I  can't do it alone!"   Learn from us the what, why and how of connecting with community to make it happen. 

So I'm one of those who grew up mildly to mostly uncomfortable with math. As a  high school student. I excelled at linguistics, and intellectual though processes. But math just didn't add up (haha) I loved the proofs of geometry. The built in meta-cognition worked for me. But algebra?  in the traditional manner of  do all the odd (or even) problems, show all your work, one right answer?  Not so much.   Sound familiar? 
Now that I'm  a part time field supervisor, coaching student teachers in all content areas, I've  been brushing up on content specific methods and strategies. Enter Mathematical Mindsets by Jo Boaler. This book has been life-changing. And it aligns with the design thinking  work I've been doing the last couple of years. Whether you're a math teacher or not, this book is for you. Boaler  provides excellent examples of how to create a collaborative classroom where students learn that there really is no such thing as a mistake. Instead, they are encouraged to share and debate ideas based on the familiar, claim, evidence, reasoning technique we see in science and language arts. Armed with the basics of number sense, students discover math facts for themselves in a constructivist style of learning. We are reminded that while there may be a right answer, there is no one right way to arrive at that answer and the power of allowing students to explore and explain their thinking. 
Boaler provides tons of great examples of simple 'games' aka activities to encourage this thinking including one of my new favorite apps kenken puzzles along with a variety of resources from youcubed.org  that will start you on the way to understanding the benefit of a growth mindset in mathematics. 
She touches on a variety of related topics as well, such as the benefits of heterogeneous vs. homogeneous grouping  in math classes. Her position on the role of homework is  particularly relevant to any content area.  She espouses the value of reflection as opposed to repetition, advocating for a sort of flipped classroom model in which the practice and discover is done in class with students engaging in self-assessment as homework. 
As I visit schools and have sat in on curriculum committee work, I routinely hear how math is 'special' that there is such a broad range of abilities  teachers require special  consideration in designing programs that essentially track students and impose upon them a fixed mindset  related to math ability, setting them up continued struggle, failure and lowered self-esteem.  Jo Boaler offers practical methods that can be implemented without a complete curriculum re-write that will ease the tension and frustration for students and teachers alike.  Add this book to your summer reading list!

Digital Learning Day 2017 is officially in the books. Each year, the Alliance for Excellent Education sponsors DLDay as a celebration of “any instructional practice that effectively uses technology to strengthen a student’s learning experience.”
West Catholic and Catholic Central high schools have participated in DLDay for the last two years. We use this day as an opportunity for students to recognize staff for their excellence in the integration of technology to enhance learning. We survey the entire student body a few weeks prior and on DL Day, the students award teachers who meet or exceed their expectations in digital learning. Each school records the day using Storify. For a round-up of activities at each school follow their link. West Catholic | Catholic Central

f you’re like me, you’ve spent some time in the last couple of years pondering the mystery of the elusive ‘engaged student’. I think I’ve finally got it figured out. Over the last few months, I’ve read three seemingly unrelated items that led to an ah-ha moment.; leadership philosophy, design thinking implementation strategy, and reports on rising teen depression. There seems to be a common thread to them all; Purpose.
Item #1  I recently read Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. For those of you unfamiliar with Sinek’s work, he’s a motivational leadership guru who focuses on the concept of Why. Your ‘Why’ being the purpose, cause, or belief that inspires you to do what you do.  His 18-minute TEDTalk lays it out.
In his book, Sinek compares motivation by manipulation and motivation by inspiration. Manipulation is the process of influencing behavior based on a tangible reward. Inspiration is the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative. Notice manipulation is controlled by an exterior force, and inspiration is intrinsic.
Item #2: I’m currently reading LAUNCH. In this book on integrating the design thinking process in k-12 classrooms, AJ Juliani and John Spencer start by deconstructing curiosity and creativity. They demonstrate how young children are exceedingly curious. They have tons of questions, and they are constantly conducting experiments; Why is the sky blue? and What do bugs taste like? are pretty universal inquiries for the pre-k set. Inspiration driven by curiosity is what motivates this tender age. As they get older, inspired curiosity takes a back seat, although not necessarily by choice. Kids learn there are such things as stupid questions and often get admonished for their curiosity when it doesn’t align with the ‘time and place’ they happen to be in.  
Item #3: There is an alarming rise in teen-age suicide and self-harm that correlates to a marked rise in depression and anxiety. There are many factors being considered in this trend, but no real data exists yet to explain it. My theory is this:
Just like adults, teens grow anxious, depressed, apathetic, and bored when they don’t feel a sense of purpose. Before the internet, access to purpose was much easier. Access to the world was fairly limited, so opportunity was more limited. This may sound like a bad thing, but compare that to nowadays when opportunity is so large scale.  It’s easy to feel like no matter what one does unless it goes viral or gets 100+ likes it just doesn’t count. Or one is so overwhelmed by the options, they do nothing. Which leads not only to a lack of fulfillment, but a feeling of failure as well.
At school, this perceived lack of purpose manifests most commonly as lack of engagement. Think about student engagement for a moment. The highest levels of student engagement occur in one of two situations: when grades are on the line (manipulation) or when a student is doing something fulfilling (inspiration). The rest of the time, they’re just going through the motions to a greater or lesser extent.
So what can educators do to shore up a teenager’s sense of purpose?
Student-centered learning.

By designing activities and lessons that allow students to tap into their natural sense of wonder and curiosity, we allow them to be inspired. Inspiration leads to inquiry. And just as when they were young children, the learning process naturally unfolds from there.

This is when educators step in to guide from the side. We coach, advise, question, redirect, demonstrate and conference. But it isn’t a free-for-all, there are learning outcomes, but when we control how the targets are reached, we strip our students of their sense of purpose. What’s fulfilling about learning something you already know, memorizing facts, copying or annotating teacher-created notes or ‘researching’ what the teacher wants to know on a teacher-designated Website?

So, how to ramp up engagement? The ISTE standards provide guidelines for the types of behaviors and competencies that will give your students the confidence and self-esteem to recognize their value and purpose within a global context.

Empowered learners set and track their goals, discover, record and analyze data to construct knowledge which is then shared as process or product. They complete this cycle repeatedly until they arrive at a final product or process and share their discoveries and creations with a real audience via blogs, audio or video productions, tweets, snaps and websites.

Not sure how to get started? Step out in the hallway, listen to what classes are creating a buzz and go visit your colleagues to see what it’s all about. Or invite an instructional tech specialist in to observe your class or help you tweak a lesson.
​
Curiosity>inspiration>inquiry>empowerment>purpose>engagement 

reading time: 2 minutes (+ if you choose to do a little follow-up)
Today’s post is a call to action. The ability to recognize integrity and honesty in the news and social media is a necessary life skill for us all as empowered citizens in a global community.
As educators, the concept of fake news comes as no big surprise. We’ve been dealing with teaching kids how to recognize legitimate online resources for years with fun hoax Websites that help us in a light-hearted way like the infamous zapatopi tree octopus site. But in recent months, what used to be a more or less minor bump on the path of research skill building has taken a serious turn.  
The 2016 election cycle, the coining of the term post-truth (??) and international crises that have been borne out of fake news bring new urgency to the need to ensure that our students are discerning consumers of media. It’s like propaganda on steroids. One well-publicized tweet that espouses a personal opinion can suddenly become ‘fact’ as it’s supported by a strong fake news article, or even a misleading headline designed to grab attention on a legitimate news item. Since many don’t read past headlines, beliefs (aka ‘facts’) are being cemented in 140 characters (or less) with alarming regularity these days.
The Huffington Post recently published a fantastic article on what to look for in a news article to verify its veracity. There are 8 recommended ways to check a source. You don’t have to do them all, any one of them would expose a counterfeit. As you dive in, be sure to follow the links. They lead to many valuable resources, including access to a codified list of ‘news’ sites created by a journalism professor to help students discern between fake news, misleading headlines, and satire.
If you only have one ed tech resolution this year, make it:  Empower your students to act with discretion and to be resourceful and knowledgeable.