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Elizabeth Helfant Archives

Summer After One-to-One Year One– A Time of PD both Networked and F2F
by Elizabeth Helfant

Our first year of a one-to-one tablet program in grades 7, 9, and 10 drew to an end back in May and almost immediately we launched into a summer filled with both face to face and virtual professional development opportunities. Those opportunities conclude this week and I’ve been reflecting on the past year this weekend.

I’d have to give my faculty high marks for the year. Our program was built around curriculum. We understood that we were building solid curriculum and the technology was a support piece that gave us possibilities. We used technology when it served student learning and when it allowed us to do things that we could not have done without it. In keeping with Understanding by Design, we build our curriculum backwards asking what we wanted to have students learn. There is an emerging understanding of the TPCK model and what it means to plan so that your living in the “Sweet Spot” of overlapping circles. We have a basic understanding of the literacies as we have defined them and of the need to have students communicate, connect, collaborate, and create. We had many highlights that we could share. As we ended the year, there was consensus that we were obligated to create a learning environment that could leverage the power inherent in the personal learning environments we gave our students. We don’t have the cure for all that ails education but the faculty have engaged in the conversation and are optimistic about contributing to a solution.  To that end, there is an understanding that faculty must engage in professional growth. They must develop a learning network.   

Professional Development Opportunities

We were fortunate to host a Summer Teacher Institute that brought to campus a number of speakers and included some internal speakers as well. All of the materials and the ustreamed sessions are available online. Below you will find a nugget, a small teaser, about each of the external sessions.

Will Richardson 

From Will's Supporting Wiki:

Our children are headed for a much more networked existence, one that allows for learning to occur 24, 7, 365, one that renders physical space much less important for learning, one that will challenge the relevance of classrooms as currently envisioned, and one that challenges our roles as teachers and adult learners.

Karl encourage us to share everything. He lead us in a terrific discussion on Wagner’s Rigor Redefined.

From Karl's Supporting Materials:

Read Tony Wagner's article Rigor Redefined from the October 2008 issue of Educational Leadership, along with this post on the Google Blog. Take a look at the seven survival skills that Wagner postulates through the lens of your classroom (or a typical classroom in your school; or, if you’re at the district level, a typical elementary, middle, and high school classroom). How does that classroom do on those seven skills?

Kevin Jarrett

Kevin lead us in a conversation about tech integration in our own unique school culture. He then spent time showing us ways to integrate Voicethread into our curriculum.

Jeff Utecht

Tomorrow we entertain Jeff Utecht. Perhaps the options above will entice you into attending the session.

We had to reschedule Darren Kuropatwa for the fall. As with all the sessions above, we will ustream and post the session content. Please join us.

In addition to the outside speakers, we had 12 days of sessions that were presented by MICDS faculty. They were attended by other faculty and by educators from the greater community. The sessions proved to be a valuable time for us to share with each other and our peers from other school. The faculty who presented the sessions had to really reflect on their uses and the articulate them. Those sessions materials are also available online and we will encourgage those who couldnot attend to access that resource later. A new essential practice for today’s educators is to take ownership of their own learning and make sure that they are staying current in their field. I’m not sure its exclusively about education changing; I think its also about proactively remaining culturally current. Other fields have done this but education has never had to adapt to external shifts to the extent that it now does.

Conferences

In addition to professional development oncampus, six of us also attended the Lausanne Laptop Institute and presented on a variety of topics. These sessions can be found here. Lausanne is a terrific conference for one-to- one schools. It provides an opportunity to mix with others who are living the one-to-one life. Given the location, Memphis, TN, it also provides a great chance to consume barbeque.

Virtual Learning Opportunities

While conferences on and off campus are fabulous for advancing people’s thinking on curriculum, they alone cannot sustain the type of professional growth that is essential to ensure that we are up to the task of creating the educational learning spaces our students need. Teachers need to create virtual networks of their own and they need to join already established virtual spaces as part of their networking. Our English teachers are engaged with the EnglishCompanion NIng and have totally enjoyed the book club sessions that happen in that space. Our social studied teachers are slowly entering the NCSS Ning and out math teachers are entering the Math 24-7 space. Almost 20% of the faculty can be found interacting on twitter. A number of them blog and almost everyone has a social bookmarking account and a google reader account, two accounts that should be required for today’s learning educators as they allow you to continue your own professional growth but also allow you to support students in their collaborative endeavors making it easier to provide greater feedback during the learning process. (You follow their work so you are alerted to changes they make and can interact with them prior to the final product submission.)

What it has me thinking

Our first phase of one-to-one has centered around understanding both the skills students need and the changing learning landscape. It has been about designing curriculum to ensure that students develop the skills they need. It has been about ensuring that each teacher is a learner and has access to the professional development that they need to continue to be current in their field.

Now that curriculum is being revised, we must focus on assessment. If curriculum changes, assessment must change. We must assess what we value. Faculty will need support to develop a deeper understanding of how to assess today’s literacies and  how to assess for learning instead of for project completion. Professional development will need to tackle this.

Schools are about collective capacity. In a true learning community, everyone has different skills  and the community leverages the talents of all involved. As we endeavor to teach students how to be learners, we must model that behavior and we will all do so in different ways and with different tools. That’s a good thing.

It isn’t about one cool tool, it is about developing a skill set that is transferable.  If we are driven by curriculum, each project might best be served by a different set of tools. The skills to use that variety are transferable between applications so students should be allowed to select any combination of tools that meets their creative needs. They need to know tools are available and how to find them. They probably need to understand an embed code. They need to understand how to play and tinker with a tool until they figure it out. We can’t teach tools, we encourage creativity and teach persistence and exploration.

It has been a terrific summer. I’ve learned a ton. But with everything I learn, I end up with another question or another idea to explore.  I depend on my network for feedback and refinement of that idea to help me learn more. It’s a never-ending cycle of pushing my thoughts, of making me smarter. As we get ready for our students to return in a few short weeks, that’s the environment I hope we can create for them. For everything they learn, I hope they have a question or an idea to explore- and I hope we are smart enough to let them answer or explore it!

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute Country Day School, a JK-12 institution embarking on a 1:1 adventure. using Tablet PCs and DyKnow.