Category: Innovative Instruction

Prepare Your Students For Digital Assessments By Using Free Online Resources

Post author By North Navigation
Post date April 5, 2017

Preparing Students For Digital Assessments

The second half of the school year brings with it major education assessments which can be a stressful time for teachers, parents, and students. PARCC, Smarter Balanced, ACT Aspire, and Common Core States Standards (CCSS).

According to The Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment:

“The average difference in the percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced in the CSTs between laptop and non-laptop students was 17 percentage points for English-language arts and 18 percentage points for mathematics, both favoring the laptop program. The greatest difference, 20 percentage points between the two groups, was observed in the sixth grade mathematics scores and eighth grade English-language arts scores.“

Student use of technology for learning and assessment prior to standardized digital testing improves test scores, along with several other benefits including directing their own learning, a greater reliance on active learning strategies, engagement in problem solving and critical thinking, and deeper and more flexible uses of technology than students without regular access to technology (source).

There are many challenges these assessments place on teachers. Here are some no-cost resources for the classroom which will help prepare students for digital assessments.

Comfortability With Technology Testing

Engaging students with a variety of online tools will help prepare students for an assortment of evaluation programs. Differences in user experience between testing platforms often confuse students. Students familiar with navigating and responding to questions in an online environment are able to focus more of their attention on the critical thinking, reading and writing requisite with assessments of all subject areas. Research shows reducing students’ cognitive load is crucial to helping them more accurately demonstrate their actual learning.

The Smithsonian Learning Lab is a free resource teachers love. The ability to add activities and assessments to the plethora of Smithsonian resources and collections provides a no-cost means to prepare students of all ages to navigate digital content, examine resources, and respond to online question banks similar to those found in the new digital statewide platforms.

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The newly released Sorting Activity Tool familiarizes students with timeline ordering and experience with another digital tool.

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Encourage Critical Thinking

Through the use of web-based tools, teachers create and publish their most innovative lessons and projects for use by colleagues on CTE Online. With over 4,000 unique lessons and tens of thousands of quality embedded OER instructional materials, this free educator platform has become a definitive source for teachers seeking ready-to-use curriculum.

[irp posts=”6790″ name=”California’s Blended PD/Curriculum Project Works To Explain Growing Popularity In Other States”]

Customize curriculum, projects, lesson plans, and resources for use in your classroom to encourage creative problem solving and get students thinking!

Creating a Martian Society STEM Integrated Project

What Works For Other Educators?

Use social media to connect with other teachers to see what works for them!

A hashtag we like to review regularly on Twitter is #EdTechChat – Educational technology experts and educators regularly share insights and reviews using this hashtag.

[irp posts=”7584″ name=”Teachers Rocked The Booth At CUE Conference”]

A source for general standardized test preparation can be found on Education.com.

Have questions about these resources? Reach out to us on Twitter or Facebook, we’d be happy to help![/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Activities Company News Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

Recognition For Research: Navigation North Keeps Development Connected To The Classroom

Post author By North Navigation
Post date November 18, 2016

Navigation North is proud to receive recognition for the research-based work we have conducted with our colleagues at the Smithsonian in developing and shaping the Smithsonian Learning Lab. Digital Promise convened experts at Teachers College, Columbia University to review and selected one exemplary company and two honorable mentions in each category. EdSurge reported on the findings, identifying Smithsonian Learning Lab for its work with extensive nation-wide teacher testing and prototyping to inform development and design.

While many teams lean heavily on marketing trends reports or committees of experts to understand classroom needs, we have found the need to balance those types of approaches with regular work directly in classrooms with teachers and students. Here is a recent snapshot of this work around digital tools and resources designed specifically for teenage learners.

Working in coordination with the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access (SCLDA) researchers, Navigation North examined strategies, processes, and tools that engage students and promote deep, sustained inquiry.

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Persistent scaffolding and questions, student notation and annotation of resources, visual indicators of student progress, and peer to peer collaboration, were a handful of the elements we observed as generated from both a survey of over 120 pieces of contemporary literature and studies on teen-use of digital learning tools and systems, and an inventory of the features contained within the top 10 predominant learning management systems and social media platforms actively used by teens across the U.S.

Distilling this information down allowed the Navigation North team to create a specific testing regimen using the Smithsonian Learning Lab as the primary environment for organization and distribution of learning resources and content for the student-testers.

All information collected is being organized into a report coming out soon as part of a Smithsonian Youth Access Grant in which Navigation North is contracted to lead and complete as part of their ongoing work as the lead design and developer of the Smithsonian Learning Lab.

[irp posts=”6679″ name=”How Is Navigation North Different From Other EdTech Companies?”]

As is usually the case, students delighted us with their intuition, instinctive aptitude for exploration and discovery, and direct feedback on what worked and what did not:

“I like all the information connected to what I’m looking at so I can add my own notes to understand later.”

“I prefer to have a way to type up what I am finding or even what I don’t fully understand when looking at the online videos. Then I can check that against what I’m reading later in the lesson.”

“If I could take what I typed directly on the picture and then use that in my answers on the test at the end, that would be what I would change.”

“I was hoping to find more information on light sabres… I mean, come on man.”

One activity had students selecting contemporary applications for some of Emerson and Thoreau’s quotes, so it was fitting when we saw one student select the following Thoreau adage, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

[irp posts=”6239″ name=”The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same”]

Whenever we go into the classroom, we always see more. A big THANK YOU goes out to the teachers who opened their classrooms to us and our colleagues from the Smithsonian, and the willingness of the students to expose their thinking, their processes, and candid feedback so we may learn from them.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Communities of Practice Digital Learning Design Education Educational Partnerships Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

Where Exquisite Summer Content Begins to Bloom

Post author By North Navigation
Post date June 28, 2016

The seeds all looked more or less the same as did the work to plant them. Now there are tomatoes, wildflowers, peppers, sunflowers, and corn well on its way. A convergence of exquisite and diverse flora from a common environment of soil and water, experience and effort.

We have been involved in some interesting conversations around what’s working for schools and districts and what’s not. As of right now, we can’t share much more than that however we will offer this. Its always amazing how clear and strong and impassioned the voices become when you start to hear from those close to classrooms who are introducing real solutions. Too often we end up engaged with teams so far outside of that reality that different types of clarity, strength, and passion dominate the conversation. In those instances, people are clearest about their titles, personal opinions run strong, and passion most-readily mirrors profitability.

But this week has been different and refreshing as a garden of sorts suddenly began to take bloom from last year’s efforts.

Smithsonian Goes Full In

At the nation’s largest EdTech Conference this week, ISTE 2016…we have the satisfaction of watching the database of users quickly close on 5,000 on only the second day of the Smithsonian team’s official launch of the Learning Lab. We look forward to seeing what teachers create when given specially designed access to over a million resources with features specifically for them and the learners they support all over the world. A year of tediously milling over research findings, design schemes, mockups, and UX flowcharts along with the requisite meetings, testing, UI interpretations…finally our latest system breaks soil and begins to sprout.

Here’s what media outlets are saying about it:

The online toolkit allows users to both find and create collections for their lessons by drawing from teaching materials and digitized Smithsonian objects via the “Discover,” “Create” and “Share” tools. (Article) –Education Week

With many teachers emphasizing real-world applications to their lessons, the Smithsonian’s free collection represents a massive database of potential course content and artifacts. (Article) – Education Dive

Molte di queste caratteristiche dei siti sono pensate per rispondere alle necessità di insegnare di insegnanti e di studenti in classi fino ai 12 anni, nell’educazione di più alto livello e in altri ambienti di apprendimento misto. (Article) –Archeomatica

Teachers Design Exquisite Content

While involved in some current research, we overheard this statement during an interview on transitioning from textbooks, “In some real ways, the proliferation of streaming media has provided consumers access to more diverse and exquisite content…teachers and students deserve no less in the classroom.”

Just a few days later, we set about publishing this year’s teacher-developed curricular projects for one of the online programs we support. In reflecting on what we saw, the term exquisite content came to mind over and over again.

One of the activities engages students in deep analyses of immigration through the lens of attitudes, facilities, laws, and induction processes as compared across various eras in America’s history.
Another project asks students to examine the concept of identity through the perspective of personal narrative, social and consumer media, genetics and biology, and culture.
With another team, the work of a Music Production teacher, an English teacher, and a Special Education instructor who shrugged off the traditional, departmentalized disciplinary construct, came together to create an integrated unit where students with special needs work side by side with their peers to create stories based on mutual challenges all students face in life and at school in the form of produced radio broadcasts, professionally mixed and edited and published to NPR.
In yet another, learners use engineering design software combined with plant and soil science and combine it with the study of psychological effects of trauma and PTSD through personal accounts of war to create a local “Healing Garden” for returning veterans and their families in a partnership with local VA services agencies.

The list goes on and on… exquisite all.

[irp posts=”6790″ name=”California’s Blended PD/Curriculum Project Works To Explain Growing Popularity In Other States”]

And now as we watch the number of teacher-authored Learning Collections begin to grow right alongside Smithsonian specialists’ created collections, we get to witness how the new platform will help the Smithsonian realize the formation of a new, authentic, global learning community where teachers’ creativity and learners’ imagination can flourish far beyond the walls of the 19 museums.

Other great Learning Collections

Where there was once soil and sand, there now blooms exquisite content…feel free to wander in and pick what you like.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Communities of Practice Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources Professional Development

Transforming Rich OER Into Instructional Music Will Take More Than a Kazoo

Post author By North Navigation
Post date April 13, 2016

By rip (originally posted to Flickr as Al 'Kazoo' Doyle) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

OER sometimes looks like millions of random musical notes at its most granular level. They can be organized in many different ways by different practitioners to create entirely different songs…and at times, some projects choose to do a bit of assembly and organize the notes into certain kinds of songs or sheets of pre-constructed music to lend more structure and focus. I find this diverse ecology of growing, available, unstructured to fully-structured OER incredibly valuable to an education system starting to finally legitimize its practitioners as important curators of curriculum and not just distributors of selected textbooks, worksheets, and test prep. activities.

It is absolutely wonderful to observe skilled educators taking seemingly disparate resources and through a deep understanding of their learners’ needs and a sense of how to blend traditional materials with new content, create a tapestry of harmonious learning activities and experiences. I marvel at how they weave in moments of reflection, connect to prior knowledge, and push for extended application through use, inspection, and analyses of resources sometimes designed for learning, oftentimes not.

I liken highly-effective teachers to talented musicians. There is a place for the notes, and the sheet music…but in the end, the actual music is a product of the musician’s interpretation. And most musicians use any number of instruments by which to organize those notes into melody. The instrument is what they use to sequence, and deliver the notes as interpreted by their own intonation and emphasis, moving quickly through some sections, while lingering with long and focused intent on others.

Consider this selection by Miles Davis entitled So What.

With some focus and effort, we are doing a better job in Ed Tech of getting more notes, more scores, and more sheet music accessible to more educators. And this was and is a big, initial piece of work that needs to be continued as more and more education-funded resource development initiatives embrace the value of sharing the derivatives of their work, more teacher teams are given the opportunity to author materials, and the growing efforts of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) result in shared, rich, digital repositories released for formal and informal learning use. As innovation goes however, crossing one threshold often brings the innovators to the next series of big challenges. One such emerging challenge is providing the right instruments by which teachers are asked to organize new resources into instructional music for their learners. To date, by and large, the digital learning industry has provided educators the equivalent of a Kazoo. Imagine that piece above with Miles Davis lips pursed around a Kazoo. We know that it can certainly produce a sound and even given notes. But given the limited sophistication of this instrument, there is no way it will adequately reflect the complexity and layers of music capable of any musician, let alone our most talented artists.

[irp]

This week I received 3 separate announcements about projects that have done an incredible job integrating diverse resource repositories and now want to showcase some of their new instruments for “creating instruction” or “blended curriculum”. These are all projects in the national spotlight and have significant funding and traction. In addition to sharing extensive OER repositories, they’ve all adopted variations on the “content playlist” solutions that’s been so popular with eLearning designers since iTunesU and Gooru Learning created some initial approaches to this archetype borrowed heavily from common media playlists underpinning iTunes and YouTube. But as Victoria University’s then Vice Chancellor Lindsay Tanner cautioned about the state of eLearning in 2011 when addressing fellow university leaders across Australia,

While we’ve made great progress in eLearning, there’s been an awful lot about ‘e’ and not much about ‘learning’. Plenty of tech, very little ped(agogy)…we need to do better.

Have we done better in the last 5 years since 2011?

Researcher Stephen Downes, through years of contributions to this field, refers regularly to a transition from static technology – which allows central agencies to document, store, and organize learning content – to haptic technology meant to support collaborative, interactive, and creative learning experiences. Just this last year, no less than 11 entire state platforms have either been introduced or gone through massive redesigns along with digital curriculum collection and sharing systems created by SBAC and PARCC at the cost of tens of millions of dollars per project. Some have integrated playlist-like resource organizers, but most still move educators through a series of grade level or standards browsing manipulations only to deliver them to a static series of pdf-based lesson plans. Regardless, teachers need a way to create relationships between seemingly disparate resources for their learners much like a musician blends notes and alters pacing. Teachers can not readily inject connective annotations, direct a learner’s focus to specific elements of a resource to help scaffold from micro to macro concepts, draw up parallels relating to contemporary issues, engage in constructivist activities while embedding social, reflective exercises to help the learner monitor personal progress and relate to how others are experiencing the information and formulating responses. That would be music. But sadly, we seem to still be handing out kazoos, and what they produce is vaguely recognizable as such.

[irp]

We have been working on prototyping some new instruments. The Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access invited us to assist in some new research on this topic as an extension of their 2-year Carnegie research project. As such, we are engaged in a deep examination of existing literature on digital learning environments and tools with a particular focus on what works for kids. We are also extending our analysis to compare popular online learning systems with everyday social media tools that seem to intrigue youth-users in creating content, looking up information, and generally engaging their peers beyond mitigated learning exchanges. So if you happen to get an invite from one of us to join Kik, Instagram, Snapchat, or Whisper, now you’ll know why. We hope to distill this research down to some common principles and features and then vet it with in-class observations and student interviews across diverse communities and school sites. Stay tuned…an until then, enjoy a sweet kazoo version of Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Digital Learning Design Education Educational Partnerships Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

Launching the World’s Largest OER Collection… Yeah, That Just Happened.

Post author By North Navigation
Post date November 24, 2015

Perhaps nobody told you, but over 1.35 million objects from the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, 9 major research centers, and the national zoo have been recently released and combined with custom tools to support rich, digital learning around the globe using the largest treasure trove of historical assets in the world.

Somewhere between 9 and 10am EST on a chilly Thursday morning late in October, a year of work culminated with the activation of a new domain. You might not have felt it, but the Smithsonian quietly released the single largest worldwide collection of OER by any one agency in the history of digital resource publishing. And the fun’s just begun.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. After a year of planning and design headed up by the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access (SCLDA) with technical design and development led by Navigation North Learning, the Smithsonian Learning Lab was launched.

Three weeks beyond a very hushed “soft-launch”, SCLDA already finds itself managing nearly a 1,000 sessions a day and has over 600 registered users. Amazingly, over 700 private Learning Collections have been created, with over 100 of them now published by teams of Smithsonian educators and various classroom teachers from across the country. With the big, official “PR” launch still months away, many already seem to be finding their way to this new environment. Teachers do talk after all. And it’s no wonder; we worked with SCLDA for two years conducting research with hundreds of top educators and classrooms across the country to design a system where otherwise passive purveyors would now have the freedom to peruse and select their own artifacts and create custom collections focused on specific topics, or designed to teach a certain concept, or explore a given genre, or examine a selected historical era.

Where there was nothing a month ago, there are now fully digitized, engaging, learning experiences as assembled by local teachers, top researchers, and historian/educators alike using artifacts from the Smithsonian’s treasure trove of historical holdings and assets. We are very proud of the contributions we were able to make to the new Smithsonian Learning Lab and look forward to seeing people assemble their own collections, make usable copies of others’, browse through the world’s largest digital repository of materials, or focus on topics as diverse as:

With over a million useful resources available right now, and an aggressive digitization strategy in place targeting another 130 million more records (that is correct, 130 million), the Smithsonian is doing its part. And we’ve done ours as well. When a system blends vast resources with teachers’ immense creativity, learners need just bring their curiosity and a desire for the world’s most comprehensive, richest resources.

Welcome to your Smithsonian Learning Lab.

Sincerely, Navigation North

Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources School System Reform

The American High School Is Still Far From Operating as a 21st Century Institution

Post author By North Navigation
Post date September 20, 2015

I loved my time teaching high school. I watched my own kids’ largely enjoy their time in high school. I always look forward to working with high school teachers and being inspired by their passion. But I bristle whenever I have to contend with some general, grandiose statement applied to a high school wether it comes during a principal’s well-intentioned Back to School Night welcome to families, or as the moniker emblazoned across the school marquee daily. Regardless of these loosely assigned assertions, the American high school can not be a 21st Century Learning environment, nor can it be any other single thing given the fractured culture and dysfunctional design by which it is operated. Where good occurs at a high school, it almost unfailingly occurs despite the system, not because of it. And where mediocrity happens, because of the system, it goes largely unnoticed, unchecked, and unexamined in almost all instances.

So here we are again at the beginning of a school year. We have two teenagers currently participating at our local high schools. One is my son who is a Junior, the other is my step-son who is a Freshman. For the record, these are respectively kids # 4 & 5 that I am personally getting to usher through their last stop in the public education system. They both have Spanish I this year, but with two different teachers. In our Junior’s Spanish class, he came home the first week and said, “I have to create an account on Quizlet.com to get to my teacher’s digital flash card sets for numbers 1-100 and days and months in Spanish.” As educational technology enthusiasts, my wife and I said, “That’s cool.” And off he went. His teacher (20+ year veteran) had all her digital sets of vocabulary, verbs, and phrases loaded in their class account for the entire year broken out by month. I noticed she had not made all of them herself, but had copied some existing sets from other educators that made theirs available to the community for sharing purposes. Smart. I know her professionally, and as a teacher of my kids; she’s good at what she does.

A week later, our Freshman came home and said, “I need to make flashcards for days of the week, months of the year, and numbers 1-100.” My wife and I said, “Makes sense, this is what Zach was doing last week in his class.” So he went on to ask us if we had index cards in the house. We both looked amused at his request since he had been using Quizlet with his middle school teachers for over two years.”Of course we don’t.” we replied. “How about you just have Zach share a copy of his set in Quizlet and use the time to study the terms instead of making your own?” Now is the point in the story that I will disclose the fact that these two kids couldn’t be more different in how they approach school. Our Junior has always required some extra “motivation” to stay on top of stuff. Our Freshman however, only requires our intervention when we have to finally pull him away from over-studying and over-preparing for every assignment and test, for every class, all of the time. He’s been this way since 3rd grade. So, it was no surprise to us when he hesitated and wondered whether we thought it would be acceptable to do his notecards on Quizlet instead of on index cards. So I asked these questions:

Did she specifically ask for paper index flash cards or show you an example? – No
Have you done flash cards in this class yet? – No
Isn’t this one of the teachers that lets you use your phones in class to look up information online? -Yes

We also reminded him that at the recent back to school night, she referred to her love of technology in the classroom so long as it helped the kids be more efficient and aid in their learning and was not being used as entertainment. We couldn’t have agreed more. Given all this discussion on the topic, true to his nature, he deiced to use Quizlet BUT insisted on making his own set from scratch so he wouldn’t get dinged for short-cutting that process. I told him, “That’s reasonable.”

And off he went on an hour of making his own set and then studying. The next morning we reminded him to share the link for his set to his teacher so she had a copy…he already had, of course. The next day, we received this text from him at lunch. “Guess what, my teacher didn’t accept my flashcards and I received 0 points for the assignment since they weren’t on paper index cards.”

He went on to share that his teacher told him that she understood he did the actual work, but because they were not standard flash cards, he wouldn’t be able to partner with another student and go through the drilling activity she had planned, thus the 0 credit. He shared with her that he could share his stack to another student with a phone, and because they were allowed to use phones, they could go through the activity just like the rest of the students and also could have the words pronounced by the app on their phones, and play other similar games as well with the selected vocabulary. She told him that it was not acceptable, and that he had one day to make all of the flash cards and turn into her if he wanted to gain back at least half of the credit for the assignment. He was crushed, and I felt compelled to email his teacher. It went something like,

“I’m partially to blame for his decision to use Quizlet. The other teachers are using it for the same assignment. Please note that he did all the work. It seems that he should get credit in this instance and we will make sure to have plenty of index cards the remainder of the year if that is how you prefer to have the students create their study aids. etc…” She did state that she appreciated my “respectful tone”, and was concerned with kids cheating on the use of Quizlet, but that he could print up his cards as sheets of paper, and then cut and tape them to index cards in order to receive credit this one time. So he did. I told him, “Don’t be discouraged. In life, in most instances your boss, your colleagues, your team, will welcome you using tools, resources, technology to try to get your part done more effectively or more efficiently…in this instance, your boss wanted something else, so that’s what you do and you move on.” He understood, but he finished with this observation: “Over my last three years in middle school, we were asked to use technology and help figure out ways to do things without paper…my first three weeks of high school, the one time one teacher had Chromebooks checked out for our class, at least 2/3 of the students didn’t even know what they were or how to use them. One teacher had us using Snapchat, which was fun but I’m not sure what it had to do with English. And now I lost points for using Quizlet.” His mom said, “Ya, I know…that sucks.” And given the nature of the middle school he attended where the 4 core teachers worked diligently to coordinate their instructional approaches, curriculum, and student expectations, his response wasn’t surprising, “So why do all my high school teachers have completely different rules for how we are supposed to do things and learn when the principal said at orientation that our school leads in innovative instruction, access to technology, and high expectations of both students and staff?”

Good question, but tough to answer on a Wednesday night at 10:15pm when a bunch of flashcards still needed to be made.

For the last 20 years, I have come to observe the American high school from 4 distinct perspectives; classroom teacher/department chair, professional development coordinator in every type of high school imaginable throughout the state, educational researcher and analyst focusing on curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and technology, and finally as a parent. Through these perspectives, I have come to one conclusion about the American high school…It is broke. And despite that, I do know that students can still find meaningful experiences with one another during high school. And thankfully they can also find given teachers in given moments that can help them grow and connect their learning to their lives. And if they choose to take advantage of extra-curricular programs, they can extend their experiences beyond the classroom in ways that can create lifelong lessons and memories. But as an institution, there is currently little to no way to recognize how the system helps to regularly enable these engagements and ensure their value as the norm, not the exception. Beyond creating mission statements and various slogans accompanied by some sheepish accountability plan that regresses within a month to a check-box exercise, the real work of ensuring a quality, unified learning environment at the high school level requires a persistence and structure that does not exist. The heavy lifting required to identify different and effective instructional strategies occurring on and beyond a campus, the communication and leadership required to support genuine, constructive collaboration amongst staff, and the creativity and willingness to let go of existing practice and protocol in order to examine cross-curricular, authentic assessment constructs that draw students into engaging, imaginative real world application of skills is rarely the outcome of these pseudo-reform campaigns.

As a teacher, I spent my fair share of time with colleagues and leadership laboring over the formation of these endeavors for my school. As a county office of education and regional coordinator, I have been asked to design and shape similar efforts for other schools and districts. As a researcher and analyst, I have been asked to help both state and federal education agencies understand the overall impact and outcomes of these initiatives. On all levels, I’ve been complicit in this process. And finally as a parent, I have now seen with 4 of my own children, what I knew all along as a teacher. No matter what anyone claims about a given high school, at the end of the day, the school is, for better or worse, a composite of the individual decisions that each teacher makes in his or her own classroom with little to no real operational connection to the school’s mission, vision, SMART goals, ESLRs (expected school-wide learning results), site-based master plan, school-wide program, single plan for student achievement, or now the LCAP (local control accountability plan).

There is only one member of the high school community that participates in all elements of what the school is, what it offers, and how its collective culture is translated into exchanges and expectations each and every day…and that is the student. And for students, and their families, it is clear that each and every class and program they rotate into an out of daily throughout the year operates primarily according to the inclinations of the teacher running that class. I believe strongly in teacher efficacy and academic freedom to make good decisions based on the needs of learners. However I also strongly yearn to see environments where professionals work together to regularly and transparently examine, define, and promote effective instruction and ensure common practices that foster learning. I have seen the transformative nature of environments where the courage to question and challenge antiquated processes and approaches is welcomed not seen as a threat. And I have been able to participate on the rare occasion with teams of teachers who hold critical both what they teach and how they teach and use that exploration to seek out other educator’s methods and share their own. But across hundreds and hundreds of experiences spanning 15 years, I can count on one hand the number of times a high school team collectively engaged any one of these types of deep assessments of their own craft and culture. I have only seen a few sites that have realistically moved their school into a position to make any kind of unified claims about the nature of their coursework and their instructional approaches.

Somewhere under the steadily waving banner of “school improvement”, you can typically find a process that merely takes one-dimensional snapshots of learning and then creates a set of “rigorous” yet vague expectations. From there, improvement ends up being a checklist of content to be covered, a timeline for administering common assessments, followed by loosely structured meetings where largely mis-informed assertions are made about the resulting data. The hard work required to build collegial expertise and move staff collectively towards defining mastery and then supporting their individual journey towards improved instruction, increased access to diverse content, and the creation of a comprehensive assessment approach that combines standard exams and project-based learning is not the outcome. And in the end, it was easier for me to write this post than to explain to a freshman why moving forward from middle school to high school has in fact seemed to move backwards in terms of a cohesive, thoughtful educational environment and experience.

Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

Shifting to Digital Learning Requires a Real Shift in Tools

Post author By North Navigation
Post date February 12, 2015

Blended learning starts with moving learning activities into a digital environment where students can access independently from the regular classroom delivery process. But that’s just the beginning.

For years, we have been examining the steps by which effective teachers organize, construct, deliver, and support learning through the process of selecting viable learning objects, materials, creating supporting instruction, verbal guidance and clarifying expectations via formative and summative exchanges.

The lead image to this post is a series of activities I developed and used with students in 1997 (Arthurian Legends – English 12) and then published as part of a statewide online curriculum sharing program…yet, about every 3-5 years since then, a new band of EdTech Evangelists enter the scene declaring the dawn of online learning resources and need for sharing communities. Sadly their message, if not new, is almost entirely necessary.

What often goes unexamined in these reoccurring swells of interest in this space, is how teachers plan and design and how various models have learned to support that process in existing and ongoing online communities of practice. There are many pieces at play when a “good teacher” is spinning up his or her craft. There are just as many models that try to define or quantify what makes for effective instruction through a process of clock_works disaggregating, defining, and typically ranking or relationally justifying those pieces.

Having spent some time in the classroom myself, and experiencing the very “organic” flow of implementing a lesson or activity where kids are connecting, comprehending, and engaging, it has always been a curious exercise to watch that moment broken down into component parts and analyzed. It often feels like the process of marveling upon the mechanics of a spring-loaded watch, only to open it up and pull it apart into its most granular pieces and lay it all atop a table. At that level, it is easy to see all the pieces and to determine what goes where, but until you put the pieces back together and get them synchronized, the watch doesn’t work.

Of late, we have been testing, designing, and developing tools that better support an effective educator in finding, organizing, constructing, and delivering learning activities online to students. Typically, those engaged in the use of digital authoring tools that approach the process with a background in developing and/or delivering instruction directly to learners (teachers, curriculum designers, professional development specialists, museum educators, etc.) are not included or significantly considered in how the tools operate or work to create and orient instructional content, learning objects, or assessments, let alone, pacing, segmentation, layering, differentiation, or metacognitive cycling. In the EdTech space, most of the heralded technology and innovation being focused upon education has been primarily invested into refining and honing steps around searching and discovering resources, organizing and exposing machine-readable metadata, recording and analyzing paradata, collecting and reporting out student data. Everything EXCEPT the creation and orchestration of the learning exchange itself. And it makes sense, being that most of those people involved in creating these tools have not spent significant Screen Shot 2014-10-17 at 12.17.52 PM amounts of their time teaching and reflecting on how to mix up the best learning concoctions through repeated trial and error as an average educator does hundreds of times a week. So people, teams, agencies, and companies unwittingly focus on tackling more tangible items like helping teachers find resources, save them, drop them into a display view,and solicit some direct student reflection about the items or respond to a simple-structure question. And yes, powerful learning can be aided by a well-developed and timely resource, but rarely do resources independently instigate and support a sustained learning experience that moves the learner through a series of inter-related cognitive cycles requisite to deep learning and connection with the content.

So in designing a new series of resource assembly and annotation tools, our focus has not been on the resources, but on the master watchmakers, the tinkerers. We have intensely paid attention to those with an intimate sense of how to precisely assemble learning exchanges that tick and tock in the ways that structure and support learning. The tools we are creating do not look like simple content management solutions that direct the educator to “build” out their content as a page or block of text. They do not exclusively refine a student response to a singular quiz-type application (Mult. Choice, T/F, Open Response, File Submission) as the method by which students “demonstrate” comprehension. Creating content and soliciting a simple response is not synonymous with creating learning and assessing understanding.

As is the case in many walks of life, the sciences, and human relationships, it is not the pieces that make up the whole of learning, but instead it lies in the assembly, sequencing, relational orientation, and synchronicity of those pieces as connected to a need to learn and grow. Subtle elements such as affording the learner a sense of progress and achievement visually, or creating intentional formative processing points that build upon each other cognitively, or lending differentiated learning pathways that affords the learners optional types of information or means of demonstration…assembling these types of exchanges do not come embedded in a Screen Shot 2015-02-12 at 2.24.47 PM WYSIWYG editor tool bar and are not rendered as a playlist of slides.

We will be doing more testing in the next few months, and a lot of building. We are excited to be in a position to apply much of what we are exploring as part of the soon to be launched Smithsonian Learning Lab (coming fall of 2015). Until then, feel free to get ahold of us if you are interested in this conversation or are working on similar fronts. We see this as a global need and one that affects learning and the potential of individuals whether they are 11year olds in the 5th grade at Copperopolis Elementary, or a 54 year old diversifying his career skills in Zakopane Poland.

Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources School System Reform

Can We Please Put the Digital in Digital OER Finally?

Post author By North Navigation
Post date January 6, 2015

Testing Digital Resources with 6th Graders - Fall 2014 (Brian Ausland)

A call for more advanced thinking in the development of digital curricular formats designed to capture the way open learning objects and resources are organized and framed by educators to create quality instructional experiences for students.

More regularly now, we are asked to look at and provide feedback to various agencies and projects that are forging the tricky waters of developing digital curriculum tools and resources for public education. From small start-ups to the U.S. Department of Education, we are asked to draw from over a decade of work in this field, and our ongoing proximity to classrooms, teachers, and students to give feedback, assistance, and guidance. We love looking at new approaches to increasing teachers’ access to rich, digital content. Ultimately we tend to get our hopes up in anticipation of reviewing a given team’s digitally-enhanced curricula that’s being promoted by a statewide curriculum sharing project, or being marketed via an agency’s big roll-out of their awesome, new curriculum authoring platform.

So whether the curricular item is referred to as a web-based project, an online lesson plan, or a digital learning resource, our imagination makes anticipatory leaps envisioning the promised innovation. However, I am always burdened by my own history in this space. In 1995 I started teaching. Because of some of my “home-grown” online curriculum at the time, I was invited to be part of a statewide project in California that brought 100 teachers together to learn FrontPage and Composer to make online versions of our best units to publish on the World Wide Web. Sharing ideas and coming up with imaginative projects and activities with other teachers was awesome, but taking those ideas and making them then conform to the old Bernie Dodge Web Quest model was not fun. They referred to our units as CyberGuides in true late ’90s web-parlance and one of mine was on the Arthurian Legends. The S.C.O.R.E project-site has long since been abandoned (I had to use the Way Back Machine to find the horrible image of my actual CyberGuide), but copies of it still persist on various teacher’s pages even today like Ms. Davis’ in Wichita Falls…http://www.wfisd.net/Page/8242. Not pretty to look at today, but hey, it was the 90’s, and I was just an English teacher with a GeoCities account and some savvy 10th graders willing to teach me some basic html and help me download CoffeeCup FTP. So I was off and running and posting up my projects for students to access online. This was all of little interest to my immediate colleagues on campus at the time. Strangely enough though, across the country, emails started appearing in my inbox from more and more teachers saying thanks for sharing, or how they had modified pieces of my own instruction for their own classes, or even asking for samples of student-work to show their own kids. Again, this was 18 years ago.

So today, when I’m asked to look at any number of new digitally-enhanced curricular authoring tools or lesson creating and sharing environments like the AFT’s Share My Lesson site, or meet with the University of California to see how they’ve convened 450 educators to produce model online integrated curriculum, I am always hopeful. I consider all the time that has occurred since the late ’90s, and how data, collaboration tools, and app-based innovation have transformed the ways in which we can access, manipulate, annotate, combine, and distribute objects, information, and ideas. Its exciting to consider the possibilities all of this presents to re-inform our old print-based, copy-righted, rigid, curricular models. I prepare to review things like:

interactive, in-line resource aggregation,
feedback mechanisms for coaching and collaborative annotations between the authoring educator and project leads, coaches, and subject area experts
design elements that frame curricular activities for independent access or in-class presentation both
metadata directing me to similar instructional items, common assessments, and models of effective use through an intentionally and intelligently integrated learning object repository,
standards alignments that not only show the specific skills being supported, but their context within other related skills found in the same domain,
options for collaborative authoring across a team of educators and visual connectors showing me the linked nature of their learning activities, materials, objects, and resources,
options allowing a user to make a full digital copy of a curriculum item for personal modification, differentiation, and specific use-cases as pertains to other instructional settings,
formative and summative framing with resulting student work samples, etc, etc, etc…

However, more times than not, I am directed to a list of PDF’s or videos. Instead of being mesmerized and drawn in by rich resources, thoughtfully organized by skilled educators, I find myself looking at none of those items listed out above, let alone a combination of many of them. And the real tragedy is in the amount of time and effort that goes into bringing together teachers, having them consider and articulate their practice and instructional approaches full of dynamic and fluid ideas and strategies, we end up modeling up very traditional, unimaginative, one dimensional frameworks. Rather than work to innovative the use of the very digital environment in which these derivative, digital learning objects are stored, the resulting content is most often published in simple digital document formats or single-perspective, lecture-based videos. The platforms themselves are often elaborate, the communication tools are robust, the group utilities are feature-rich, the overall design is thoughtful and responsive, but when you get to the OER objects, we end up browsing through tired collections of PDFs, embedded Crocodoc files, passive html pages, or simple play-lists of materials where teachers might have not even developed much of the material, but instead were merely asked to assess it’s instructional value, subject-focus, and standards alignment. The curriculum or key learning assets make little to no use of the rich, digital, database supported environments in which they are hosted. So while it seems that programs often afford their web site and auxiliary functions and marketing content far more UI and UX considerations, the actual instructional artifacts the program is designed to solicit, build, develop and deploy get stuck with antiquated design models. After all the work that goes into these types of programs, and we know the work well, this should be the easiest part to get right…right?

We endeavored to work on this issue over the past year as part of supporting a number of programs that assemble teachers together and ask them to combine their curricular thinking and instructional approaches and integrate those with rich learning objects to create curriculum that can serve as a point of collaboration and sharing.

I like to think that what we’ve been working towards harkens back to that small community of early adopters from back in the mid 90’s. The tools were so much more limited, but the audience was clear and tangible, and those of us having to figure out how to FTP our simple pages and directories were the very teachers who had an intimate understanding of how learning occurs. What we lacked was the technology to adequately capture and replicate our innate sense of instructional scaffolding. Now much of that technology exists, but a rift has developed between those that develop the tools and those that know how learning happens. We are trying to bridge that divide with various programs we are supporting. The work represents a decade of designing and implementing online curriculum authoring and professional development programs. Creating the platforms, the tools, designing the outreach, conducting the trainings, but most importantly, wading deep into classrooms regularly to implement with teachers and students in all types of situations and settings is the real work. The resulting models don’t look like traditional lessons and projects, nor should they in many instances. They are however designed to help educators make best use of online learning objects, capture and coordinate their instruction singularly or in teams, and ultimately focus on how real learning sequences and exchanges occur for students when being guided by quality teachers and field-based research taken directly from the classroom.

Title: Epic Epidemiological Examination (Project-Based STEM Unit)
Team: Biomedical Teacher, History Teacher –
Summary: Dive deep into a journey that examines basic characteristics of viruses, introduces the concept of index cases and patient zero and elicits the importance of ELISA testing in case identification. It illuminates human tragedy and the impact of an array of public health epidemics that transformed approaches in disease prevention and intervention commonly used in the 21st Century.

Title: Exploring the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Lesson Plan with Integrated Coaching Annotation)
Team: Susan Carle is an English teacher in Long Beach Unified School District, Sheri Coburn is a curriculum and instruction coach with San Joaquin County Office of Education.
Summary: Using the controversial and captivating, historical medical biography of Henrietta Lacks, students will learn how to closely read, paraphrase,interpret and evaluate science essays. This lesson focuses on non-literary reading as emphasized in the California Common Core State Standards.

Title: The Presidential Experience Project (Online Blended History Activity)
Team: Smithsonian Educator Specialists, Navigation North Digital Curriculum Specialists
Summary: In this blended History activity, students research various aspects of a selected U.S. President and work to search and use the historical objects and artifacts associated with the man and his tenure in office as compared to the top issues of the era in which he led to create a Presidential Exhibit. (Prototype)

Title: Introduction to Circles (Blended Learning Activity – Gr. 4-6)
Team: 6th Grade Math Teacher & District Library Media Specialist
Summary: In this math exercise on parts of a circles, students learn the basic terminology of circles, formulas for determining how to calculate area and circumference and practical applications of this knowledge.

(These samples are pulled from projects ranging from a statewide CTE/STEM model curriculum initiative where teams of teachers work online to create integrated Academic and STEM-based, career pathways projects, a statewide CCSS lesson share program, and a series of curricular tools that provide teachers the ability to craft authentic, differentiated instruction.)

While some of these tools have already been implemented with success across various online educator communities, we are even more excited about those that are being designed and tested for direct student use in asynchronous and synchronous implementations (ie. blended learning). Running comparative analyses between identical online student learning content framed out in similar structures as above and then implemented against a cohort of existing resources such as Blendspace, Pathbrite, Gooru, and Versal, we have found repeatedly that the student response data has shown increased ability to use, navigate, research, and demonstrate learning gains. We believe some of this is attributable to implementing tools that better provide a given teacher a clear method to replicate and communicate their instructional decisions and scaffolding in a unified way along with the sequenced learning objects/resources they’ve selected. In and of themselves, playlists of objects, videos, and quizzes aren’t structured to perform in this way and don’t provide enough spacing for subtle, but key cognitive reflection points nor room for learner differentiation based on those “formative forks” that occur when a good teacher is guiding students. More testing is occurring now, and the data is supporting our inclinations. We are excited to be moving the conversation and the focus of back to the learning process itself, and ultimately welcome more projects, programs, agencies, and firms to do the same. We are not trying to abandon paying homage to traditional curricular formatting which is designed to document and record static instructional models. We are merely more interested in creating new models that are designed to capture and publish fluid, organic, strong learning exchanges crafted by practitioners each and every day in classrooms across the nation. Platforms that are making resulting student data more readily accessible and usable for teachers, that are presenting diverse ways for colleagues to coordinate and communicate, and are enabling up-stream agencies to track and monitor assessment data across large systems for strategic long-term decision making are all good things, but only when they are also paying attention to the heart of the matter.

For us, the heart of the matter is found in that place where student curiosity and interest intersects with a given teacher’s ingenuity and creativity. We welcome others to join in making sure we are ultimately making decisions, building tools, and channeling technology to support the efficacy of that exchange, and helping to enhance, capture, illuminate, and share it wherever possible.

Communities of Practice Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

An Invitation to Dream; an Imperative to Act

Post author By North Navigation
Post date November 8, 2014

As part of a work-related project, I was reading the Smithsonian’s Strategic Plan entitled, A Smithsonian for the 21st Century. Under the heading of Broadening Access, I was inspired by the following excerpt:

…we will leverage the power of technology using new media and social networking tools to deliver information in customized ways and bring our resources to those who cannot visit in person <via> next-generation technologies that speak to “digital natives” who expect to be reached online.

The Smithsonian sees itself as a “holder of remarkable and scientifically important objects and home to world-class expertise, to expand knowledge and add meaning to our world.” and as such, uniquely positioned to Revitalize Education. The Smithsonian is quite possibly the world’s single largest collection of informational assets and expertise, consisting of 19 museums, and 9 research centers containing 138 million physical objects of which nearly 9 million are digitized and published online. In 2013 alone, 30 million people traveled to one or more of the Smithsonian’s sites while 140 million visited the website. Consider learners and educators gathering, in a classroom, in a library, at an after school program…consider a young mind wanting to know more, curious to know why, struggling to know how and parents working to support and foster that sense of inquisitiveness around dinner tables all across the country on any given night. Then consider the expansive value of tapping all the items, information, knowledge, and expertise collectively known as the Smithsonian.

(Video from the Smithsonian: http://www.si.edu/About)

We are in the midst of beginning a year-long journey with the Smithsonian’s Center for Learning and Digital Access starting next week. We will be considering the classrooms and dinner tables described above. We will consider teachers and students and families and institutions of learning big and small, formal and informal alike. This week we have been preparing for our first visit and planning meeting in Washington DC with our partnering team from Philadelphia and our education and research colleagues from the Smithsonian itself. We have taken a look at their existing educational materials, content, activities, and outreach methods and will spend the first few months dreaming and prototyping new approaches to help innovate and revitalize the role the national treasure known as the Smithsonian plays in the educational process.

We have distilled over two years of research, findings, and data and combined it with over 15 years of experience working in this field with and alongside teachers and students the entire way. However, our biggest challenge will be to balance 168 years of the Smithsonian’s work with the needs of a single learner. Both will need to be held equally reverent in our processes if we want to do this right. We will be calling on many of you to help us this coming year. Together its time to let the DREAMING begin…but only as a precedent to ACTING. Talk soon…

(This is a sample of one of the prototypes we have been working on this week to capture and redeploy an existing Smithsonian Learning Quest for students)

Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

Assessing Assessment Applications

Post author By North Navigation
Post date September 10, 2014

As our next installment of Back-to-School Digital Resources most teachers should know about, here are some assessment tools that “pass the test”. (Get it? Test…Assessment Applications? Hellooooo…errrr, hmmm.)

Plickers (https://www.plickers.com/)
video tutorial

Let’s start with the funkiest one that I have grown to really like, Plickers. Here’s how it goes: You go to Plickers and create your free teacher account and set up your class of students. You print off a card for each of your students that they can hold up in response to questions that you pose to them. Like maybe you ask, “Why did England increase the number of British troops sent to the American colonies following the French and Indian War?”

a. To help keep the colonists from streaming into the Ohio River valley.
b. To address the escalating aggression growing between local Native American tribes and frontiersmen.
c. To better enforce the growing levels of taxation thrust upon the colonists to help pay for the war.
d. All of the above.

Depending on the student, they rotate the card to present the a, b, c, or d on the top of their card and hold it up as such to where you can see it. But actually, you don’t need to see it, your scanner/camera on your Samsung or iPhone or iPad or Tablet that you wand around the room “sees” it and records their responses and attributes each response directly to the student who generated it. The students scores are instantly entered into your Plickers roster for you to show on the board as response trends, and later to use for grading. Seriously, it works. Seriously, its free. Watch the video if you don’t believe me.

Kahoot (https://create.kahoot.it)
video tutorial

Kind of like the Plickers app but all the students will need a device of some kind to get online and participate. They can use their school supplied tablets or computers or their own smart phones for that matter.

You create a free account, set up your students and build out your quizzes or use other teachers’ quizzes that are shared and searchable on the system. A “game-pin” code is generated and you send your students to kahoot.it and they enter the game pin code to start their quiz. Questions can have time limits as assigned by the teacher, and all response data is recorded for each of the participating students and made available to the instructor for grading. Pretty straight forward and works. Here is a teacher-made video tutorial on how she uses Kahoot.

Socrative (http://socrative.com)
video tutorials

This system is a bit more robust than Kahoot. Again, you create your free teacher account and set up your student list in the system. You can then direct students to quizzes you created or adopted from other teacher-users. Unlike Kahoot, you can elect to have the questions in your quizzes time-based or just let the students conduct at their own pace. Another fun feature is the space race mode in which it shows real-time, visual results of students answering questions correctly.

A student answering correctly in this mode, makes their rocket move across the screen much the same as the carnival game where you spray water causing your race horse to advance across the race-course. All resulting performance data is gathered and provided to the instructor and can be viewed within Socrative or downloaded as a spreadsheet for integration into your local grading software. Good, free, cool features. Here are the videos.