Categories
Career and Technical Education Digital Learning Design Education Educational Leadership STEM

College & Career Ready Doesn’t Come Easy in LA High Schools

Increasing access to educational opportunities that are truly College and Career Ready is a tall order…particularly in the nation’s 2nd largest school district.

However, for those prepared to roll up their sleeves and wade deep into rooms of teachers looking to legitimately analyze and examine their curricular approaches from basic assignments to key assessments, good things can happen. Coaching teams of teachers over the course of 3 full days, and utilizing online collaboration and authoring tools created to specifically structure an effective approach, teachers unlocked the best they have to offer students aspiring to go far beyond high school.lausd_training

Navigation North was invited to lead another intensive curriculum series in which we worked with teams of STEM and CTE educators from some of the nation’s largest high schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District. Two cohorts of educators labored to re-design and submit their courses of study to the University of California’s meticulous A-G approval process with the hopes of getting them reviewed and approved as rigorous, university-level coursework that also provides students 21st century STEM/CTE programs across diverse career pathways.

Working exclusively within our online collaborative platform to help manage the work flow of the teams with outline development, creation of key lesson plans and projects, and sharing of course models and authoring strategies, teachers were successful in developing and submitting a whole new list of approved coursework for students across some of the nation’s most diverse secondary campuses. These STEM-rich, career-ready courses will now not only provide students access to hands-on, experiential, career ready learning BUT will also satisfy key requirements necessary for students wanting to qualify to enter one of nine University of California campuses or any of the California State University campuses as an incoming college freshmen. Now that is increasing access!

Hi Brian, you guys helped me and my colleagues re-develop and write the Foods and Nutrition G-elective curriculum. I just wanted to thank you and let you know that the class has been UC APPROVED! GO US! Thank you so, so much for all your help and coaching.

-Stef Kelly, Carson Senior High School Culinary Science Program Lead

Due to the hard-work and diligence of the devoted teachers we met, the courses below (and their related Industry Sectors or Pathways) were designed and approved as new CTE focused, UC preparatory programs for LAUSD students giving them both high-quality CTE programming while also gaining them valuable University of California approved coursework. This is what true College and Career Ready looks like!

  • Agents of Social Change – Entrepreneurs in the 21st Century – Marketing and Sales
  • The Business of Music – Marketing and Sales / Arts, Media, and Entertainment
  • Engineering Dynamics – Engineering Design
  • Experimental Photography – Arts, Media, and Entertainment
  • Family Structure: Teen Roles and Transitions – Education, Child Development and Family Services
  • Food Science, Technology, & the Modern Pantry – Food Science, Dietetics, and Nutrition
  • Food and Nutritional Sciences – Food Science, Dietetics, and Nutrition
  • Formulating Statistics for the 21st Century – Information and Communication Technologies
  • Graphic Communications – Information and Communication Technologies
  • New Media A/B – Arts, Media, and Entertainment
  • Principles of Accounting – Business and Finance
  • Screen Printing and Design – Graphic Production Technology
  • Architectural Design 2 – Engineering and Architectural Design
  • Digital Photo Design – Design, Visual, and Media Arts
  • Empowering Professional Literacy – Business Management

We are proud of the work these dedicated teachers performed during their summer break, and even more proud of the results they garnered from the UC High School Articulation Office and the opportunities it will provide their students moving forward.

Navigation North Personnel Leading the Training Program Included:

Brian Ausland  brian9    &  Jodi Halligan  jodi7

Categories
Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources School System Reform

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

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-Screen Shot 2015-09-14 at 7.45.09 AMson 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? – Noflash_cards
  • 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 class11other 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.

 

Categories
Company News Digital Learning Design Education Educational Leadership Professional Development

New Online PD Tools Beg for New Content Approach

Today we’ve launched an exciting new set of online professional development authoring tools within our education platform Cartographi. That was the easy part; the program content on the other hand presents a more complex set of issues.

project_board

 

It is always exciting to move from the initial project planning on the whiteboard to then months later launching out a whole new set of tools and a program. In this instance, the modules represent a model of teacher induction specific to Career and Technical Educators that come directly from industry with the intent of bringing their vast career experience to the classroom as new teachers. So consider a long-time ICU nurse, who is transitioning his love of the profession to come teach Health Careers Occupations to high school Juniors and Seniors, or a recently retired Civil Engineer, who wants to come teach two sections of Beginning and Intermediate Engineering Design drawing upon many of the skills she knows to be requisite to that industry sector.

These two examples, and thousands of others like them, often have little to no teaching experience, but all of the desire and energy to step into a classroom to expand students’ understanding and access to both Career and College pathways tied to their respective career fields. Instead of engaging in a local teacher induction program (if one can even be found in their local area), they can participate in a series of 6 online modules covering everything from:

  • policy and regulations, to
  • lesson planning and design, to
  • classroom management and assessment

Because the modules were certified by both the California State Board of Education and the California State Commission on Teacher Credentialing, modifying the content itself was not permissible. However in transferring the content from an older, linear model PD framework, to a new environment and set of tools that allow for online learning approaches such as differentiated pathways, formative assessment cycling, meta-cognition activities, packaged with shorter bursts of content, embedded media, and granular scaffolding around key resources.

Screen Shot 2015-07-06 at 12.03.32 PM

So, when it comes to deploying content not initially designed for these features nor designed to be presented to the learner within such a framework, you stand to seriously expose or illuminate specific gaps in instructional flow. When an agency looks at the work as being a matter of merely replicating their existing content, they should instead consider rethinking delivery and learner experience as an opportunity not an obstacle. We are working with the program leads now to take a look at including a specific line of inquiry when asking a learner to watch a video, or having learners create a specific cognitive map showing points of personal and professional relevance across research sources, or integrating existing curriculum mapping tools when asking the learner to create common curricular artifacts such as course outlines, lessons, or activities for students. It is exciting to discuss the prospects of creating diverse pathways for the learners based on the existing knowledge they bring to the course, or allowing them access to specialized resources tailored to the career field they came from originally. When a tool allows you to see your content in a new light and then do something better with that new information, you know you’re on the right track. So far about 300 new learners have started in on the modules and are moving through their activities and competencies.

While many talents went into re-developing this program content and the eloquent system in which it now resides, we wanted to make a point of identifying Dan Krieger for his system architecture prowess on this project, and Jodi Halligan for one month of dedicated re-design of all the instructional content and activities and the young Frank Quinn for ongoing testing, content and user migration, and client support. Incredible work team!

danny_boyjodi_girlfrank_quinn_21 (1)

Categories
Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

Shifting to Digital Learning Requires a Real Shift in Tools

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_worksdisaggregating, 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 PMamounts 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 PMWYSIWYG 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.

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

Can We Please Put the Digital in Digital OER Finally?

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.

Screen Shot 2015-01-07 at 2.41.24 PMSo 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…

L1280863However, 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 –
SummaryDive 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.

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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.

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Title: The Presidential Experience Project (Online Blended History Activity)
Team: Smithsonian Educator Specialists, Navigation North Digital Curriculum Specialists
SummaryIn 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)

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Title: Introduction to Circles (Blended Learning Activity – Gr. 4-6)
Team: 6th Grade Math Teacher & District Library Media Specialist
SummaryIn 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.

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(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 shownL1280869 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.

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

An Invitation to Dream; an Imperative to Act

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)

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Categories
Career and Technical Education Communities of Practice Education

Making the Term “College and Career Ready” Real for Real Teachers and Kids

Today I am experiencing a sense of great pride and sincere sadness as a transition occurs for me and a project I started, led, and grew over 5 years. Mostly I’m happy though that, once again, some of the state’s top Career and Technical Education Teachers and their STEM Academic counterparts are joining together to show that there are incredible ways to teach academics AND illuminate diverse, exciting careers and career-ready skills to kids.

Enclosed is a picture of what I will guess is probably about the 18th CTE Online Model Curriculum Institute as it begins today for a number 10337729_10204010469440309_4553418993136468202_nof teacher-teams from across the state of California in Sacramento. All the pieces are familiar, tables with laptops, notes, materials, hovering instructional leads (all current or former classroom teachers by design), and the CTE Online site up on the screen. While I don’t see it, I am certain there is coffee and danishes and fruit in the back of the room, and with any luck, a variety of flavored creamers. (which always seemed like one of the most difficult and absurd things to secure given all of the other technical moving pieces to this puzzle)

However, I am not there this time around as I have been asked to help aid similar projects now with the USDOE. After growing and leading this program in CA since 2005, I have placed it in the capable and caring hands of good friends and colleagues that have worked with me on this in various capacities over the last 5 years. Today, they take it forward without me, and for that I am proud. But as I write this, and work on other projects now on my plate…I do so missing the excitement of meeting new teachers, the exhilaration of hearing their project plans and instructional approaches, sharing a cup of coffee and discussing students, resources, and how frustrating and promising technology can be in the classroom. Mostly I miss the incredible projects these folks put together for kids beyond a text-book, and often time beyond the confines of the classroom itself.

Screen Shot 2015-01-13 at 10.45.08 AMIn 2005 we dared to consider using an online lesson authoring tool integrated with high-end digital resources and then state academic and CTE standards to allow these great teachers to create and share the detail of their best lessons and projects. The first pilot we performed was in Chico CA and involved about 25 educators working independent of one another, all autonomous in their disciplines ranging from Auto Teachers and Early Childhood Educators to Culinary Teachers and Engineering/Architecture Instructors. They each created what they considered to be their 4 best lessons in the online environment and were guided by the tool and a small team of me and two technical support staff. Once we published those 100 or so lessons to CTE Online, the site’s access immediately grew from an average of 10-20 visits a day to 200 in the first 3 weeks. Over the years we expanded the program to include institutes all over the state, and involved up to 145 teachers in a given year. We also started soliciting teams of teachers from academies and programs where academic core staff and CTE/STEM staff worked together to create project-based units of multiple lessons. We paid the teachers for their curriculum, we treated them like professionals, we selected some of them to serve as specialists and instructional leads to support future teams and groups in our program. We did dinners together, and convened in hotel rooms to work through ideas late into the night. We made lots of friends amongst these teachers many of whom I call on and connect with regularly to this day. (below, growth of users per month on CTE Online from 2010-2014)

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As the culture grew, the site grew. So in addition to friends, we also inadvertently made some people very uncomfortable. In part, introducing a statewide professional development and curriculum training model that took some new approaches seemed to challenge and threaten various existing models and systems:

  • Compensate: Pay teachers for their time away from their own homes and families and for their expertise as almost all other professional industries do.
  • Respect: Dispense with the cult of expertise that castigates teachers to the role of sitting and listening to the purported wisdom of experts, and instead place teachers in the role of sharing and leading and learning with one another from one another.
  • Disclose: Be open, transparent, and forthright with your budget. Openly discuss where and how the dollars are used, how much money you’ve received, and the diligence you afford to being responsible custodians of those dollars.
  • Cover: Make participation in the program cost-neutral for teachers by covering their travel, hotels, meals, incidentals and for the districts/schools that send them by covering substitute pay. Make it inclusive by engaging teachers from all over the state, at all levels of teaching experience and topic areas/disciplines.
  • Invest: In order to afford much of the above, resist sinking significant percentages of the budget on full-time positions within the agency receiving these project dollars, instead invest in authentic activities and measurable outcomes tied to the project’s objectives.
  • Produce: Take on a production mentality that allows you to objectively demonstrate the deliverables and artifacts created and published as invested in by the funding. Collect and report measurable, objective data to account for all expenses and outcomes. (For $1 million dollars, we work with almost 200 teachers annually and produce over 400 lessons that are then used by nearly 2,000 educators each day across California and conduct definitive entry and exit surveys to identify the exact skills gleaned during our direct support components of the program.)

For a few years, I was under the impression that we should aggressively document and share these approaches and offer our strategies and methods to assist other statewide program agencies and their leads at the department of education. We could help many of them stop running afoul of many or most of these tenets. I was naive in that belief.

Instead of pats on the back, we were primarily marginalized as a technology project that replaced rigorous curriculum examination and experts with computers. We weathered apathy that ranged from polite disinterest to completely ignoring our data and in some instances, active dismissal and direct undermining by other projects and their leads when we suggested all programs should minimally collect and disclose performance data tied to their objectives and their budgets.  Perhaps our legacy was not meant to be one of systemic change.

Screen Shot 2014-10-23 at 10.56.13 AMHowever, along the line we did find those few leaders at the state department, and amongst local agencies that saw our approach and our data for what it was worth. They waded into the bureaucratic tangle we caused and pushed beyond the rhetoric to lend us support and shield us when the barrage became the heaviest. They have the scars to show for it. I thank them for that, and the teachers who were brave enough to bare their curricular thinking and planning and trusting us to not critique or judge but instead to ask questions, guide, coach and always collaborate in bringing out their excellence and allowing us to help tell the story of their effectiveness and commitment to students. (See Projects Here)

Last week I listened in on an exciting planning session led by the wonderful woman who took over the lead position. Afterwards she sat and reflected with me about the incredible teacher-teams that had signed on to attend their first institute and concluded by sharing, “I just keep telling everyone, I have the best job in the world now with this project.”…and another colleague then sends me these pictures today of all the teachers starting their process, and one of the instructional leads I recruited two years ago who is there now leading other Engineering and Math teachers text me, “This is going awesome. The new website and tools are so cool and the teachers love it.”…

I am clear on the real legacy of this project in the minds of the people that count. Yet, I bristle at the fact that each and every year, we have to fight aggressively to qualify the effort, time, and investment in getting this project supported, while the state continues to throw millions of dollars at projects led by university-based agencies on behalf of high schools that assembles professors and “curriculum specialists” from various universities and agencies and then subjugates a handful of teachers to these “experts” to create, not projects or lessons or activities to use in the classroom, but instead, mere administrative outlines for courses that focus on UC math, science, english, and lab requirements to the detriment of legitimate CTE/STEM skills and career exploration for students. Given $3 million a year, and operating for 4 years now, they produced 35 pdf-based outlines. What does a $342,000 outline look like you might ask? Here ya go…UCCI Outlines. Our project received $850,000/yr. and produced 56 outlines, 500 Unit Plans, 4,000+ Lesson Plans all with embedded activities, materials, and assessments that can be used as published as a fully digitized resource or modified for direct implementation in the classroom. And are accessed over 2000 times a day by teachers. Ultimately, I’ve had to put all that in the ol’ bucket of “things I can’t control” for my own mental health. I guess if I am honest, our project has some hurdles too that we struggled to overcome. For instance, one of the participating teachers emailed me a few moments ago and said, “I must admit, the workshop is going great, even without you here…sorry. But if it is any condolence, they did forget to get flavored creamer for the coffee again.”

Categories
Digital Learning Design Education Open Educational Resources School System Reform

Back to School the Designers Go

Its time to go back to school for the Navigation North team. So we packed up a few researcher friends from the Smithsonian, a videography team, and our own personnel and we went and knocked on some classroom doors to see if the kids could play.

Here were the questions,

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  • If kids could access anything that the Smithsonian has in its vast collections, what would they want to see?
  • What would they want to do?
  • How would they want to play with and learn from these items?
  • How would they want to modify, adapt, organize and show what they found?
  • What were the crazy, outlandish ideas they concocted that we couldn’t anticipate?

So we waded into the deep end of 3 different 6th grade classrooms and with the help of some incredibly talented teachers, engaged the energetic and boisterous hordes. While a

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video/audio team maneuvered through the sea of students, we explored Lincoln’s life and death masks and wondered aloud if we could find evidence that he actually was a secret vampire hunter as portrayed in a contemporary film.

We surfed through decades of lunch boxes trying to understand how the pop-culture and media of a given decade surfaced on the food containers of youth across the nation. From Howdy-Doody, The Lone Ranger, Yogi Bear, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Disco a’la Saturday Night Fever, to the Transformers, Star Wars, and Snoopy. It was all there. We then watched the kids hunt for items of their own interest. From Cute Cats, Creapy (sic) Spiders, Beast Swords, to UFO’s, Football Heroes, Joe DiMaggio,Mary Todd, and Triceratops.

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We then asked them what they would want to find, what they would want to do with stuff they found, and what more they would want to know and see and understand. This information will assist us in a project we will begin next month with the Smithsonian. Kids are wide-open with their criticism and directives when using digital tools, they want things to work, they want to modify, customize, share, mark up, and adapt. We have our work cut-out for us to be certain. Stay tuned…

Categories
Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

Assessing Assessment Applications

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

Screen Shot 2014-09-09 at 4.58.31 PMLet’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

Screen Shot 2014-09-09 at 5.53.50 PMKind 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

Screen Shot 2014-09-10 at 8.19.33 AMThis 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.

Categories
Digital Learning Design Education Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

Passing the Back-to-School-Tool Sniff Test…

At work, I often engage with various educators and educational leaders on a number of ed. tech related projects. Away from work however, I have a small but pesky group of teachers who I relate to more as friends than as colleagues or control group members or use case study subjects.

Not to say I don’t ask them to help me out on occasion in those roles, I do…but with them, I can at least have a beer afterwards and finish the conversation with, “See you Sunday at Kim’s house for the season kickoff party.” In turn, these folks often ask me, off the clock, if I’ve seen anything worth sharing. Despite how well I know some of them, they always seem leery and cautious in asking. Its understandable, they’ve been abused by over-zealous technology coordinators and over-ambitious ed. tech marketeers these past few years. They are weary of hearing about the latest and greatest, but will on occasion afford me some access to their curiosity in the hopes that I too don’t abuse it.

They’ve become numb I guess due to all of the marketing and hyperbolized promises that surrounds some online tool that gets touted as the newest CCSS aligned, portfolio-based, authentic assessment engine but ends up essentially being a web-based version of PowerPoint with questions.

Ultimately, they know that in a given month of work I see LOTS of stuff and test LOTS of claims. They also know that I am very pragmatic if not a downright jerk in how I view most classroom software and applications. Some of my opinions have not garnered favor with many a well-funded start-up trying their damnedest to get their color of Koolaid stained upon the lips of teachers and students abroad.

However, when I do see an occasional good tool, I’m happy to share. I thought maybe I’d try posting them over the next week or so for anyone interested. Here are a few I’ve found to “not-suck” for my Back to School colleagues out there. On this post, I will focus on tools that let you search for stuff and make things out of them.

Edpuzzle (https://edpuzzle.com)

  • Find videos by topic
  • Crop videos
  • Add notes (text or audio)
  • Embed questions into video

EDpuzzle

Its not a puzzle actually. It is a simple way to put in a search term like Photosynthesis or Ratios or American Revolution and find any number of online videos on the topic. It cross-references free, legitimate video providers like National Geographic, TED, Khan, YouTube, TeacherTube, etc…AND THEN let’s you modify the video with easy cropping to get just the clip you want, and embed notes or audio to the video or even questions directly into the clip. If you want you can add students to your account and create classes and then “assign” the video to your students via email and an access code. When students go in and watch video and answer questions, you see where they are at, what they’ve watched, and any answers they’ve submitted. All free. Very easy to set up and use.

OpenEd (https://www.opened.io)

  • Search for online resources
  • Big list of resource partners
  • Filter by standards, topics
  • Add your own information and create playlists

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One, big search tool for online instructional resources. Like many platforms of this ilk, youcan search by a list of topics (Math, English, History, etc.) or by Common Core Standards or even by SBAC or PARCC. If you are a teacher, you should know what those last two are, if not, look it up. You can filter for types of resources you want to see like Assessments, Games, Lessons, Activities, Videos, Questions, etc…and then if you want, add them into a “playlist” or even build them into a course. I’ve found that this site has a really credible list of resource partners that have their materials integrated into this one source. So you should be able to find something of value and use in the classroom almost every time.

Blendspace (https://www.blendspace.com)

 

  • Search for resources or media
  • Simple search by keyword across many sources
  • Assemble into mosaic and embed quizzes

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Yes, I did make fun of this company some months ago, but that was just due to their name change and the form mail they used to announce it. But, I did like it even back then. It is simple, no CCSS aligned searches, no topic directory, just put in a term you want to search for and find stuff online from Google, YouTube, OpenED (mentioned above), etc…because those engines are integrated into this tool. Once you find items you merely drag and drop them into your canvas and it creates a quilt-like mosaic of your items or a more uniform grid or list (you set it how you want it). You can then pop in the occasional quiz or additional information as separate squares into that pattern and then set up your class of students and have them access and complete as assigned.

So there ya go. Take it or leave it, I have no vested interest in any of these…although, full disclosure, I was excited to see Learning Registry cited as one of the sources delivering materials into the OpenED platform. (Our office has been working on that metadata-structure to be used precisely in this way to help enrich resource queries and returns for teachers via search tools, so yay.) This picture was based on a search in OpenED for Tectonics.

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