My Favorite Pinnacle Takeaways

Whew....What a week!  There are so many things that were learned this week it's hard to pin-point just a few.  I truly enjoyed collaborating with other teachers to see what great things they were doing in their classrooms and trying to adapt those ideas as my own.  The snacks were amazing as was lunch on Thursday!  Many thanks to Mt. Holly Middle school for hosting us and for the food they provided.  Thanks to the instructional technology facilitators for the countless hours they spent preparing for this week.  You all are amazing and your hard work shows!  For a funny review of our week see my twitter!  

https://youtu.be/SpLkoSBXz7I

Blog Post Day 1 Pinnacle Year 2

Three Things I Found Out:

1.  Personalized Education would be great if I could manage it.
2.  Spreadsheets are confusing!  :-(
3.  SAMR - ask me......I'm quite the expert now!  :-)

Two Interesting Things:
1.  I'm looking forward to working with my group to create our project.
2.  Elisabeth is going to be "low key" this year since she was moved the 4th grade.

One Question I Still Have:
1.  Will we have more time tomorrow to work on our App-mazing Race Project?  (love it)

A Letter to a Parent to Explain SAMR

Dear Parent,
Thank you so much for your concern over your child's education and use of technology.  I do agree that pencil and paper were just fine in past years but I'm sure you want your child to do greater things and learn so much more than you did as a child.

By using SAMR, students are able to do just this!  They can take a basic assignment and truly make it awesome and dive deeper into learning.  Imagine a simple writing assignment in which students create an argumentative essay.  By incorporating SAMR into my lesson plans, the students can take that basic essay and publish in a blog entry where others can express their opinions and the students can argue their opinion.

The SAMR initials stand for:

S - Substitution
A- Augmentation
M- Modification
R- Redefinition

Here's a pretty cool illustration showing where I would ideally like to incorporate SAMR in my classroom.  I want to strive to get my students into the "deep end" of the pool which means that they will be engrossed in technology.  

Here are some technology projects that my students have worked on during the first semester of the 2014 year.


Green Screen Cup Commercials


STEM activities/ Explorers and Original Colonies


Heat Transfer Projects

PLN's

Today in our Pinnacle training, we discussed PLN's and what we all used to stay in touch with others in education.  I learned several new ways, one being Twitter.  I currently use Twitter, but I learned how to follow different "chats" that are happening.  I was able to follow several different people and their chats.  I'm looking forward to participating in some of these chats and learning lots of things!

Andragogy (My Pinnacle Experience)

Any clue what Andragogy is?  Yep....I didn't either.  Imagine this:

You are presenting a technology workshop to a group of teachers.  Needless to say, there are many different personalities and needs.  You have the ¨small¨ (and I do mean small) group of teachers that can pretty much figure things out on their own along with the ones that need some instruction to complete a project.  Then you have the ones that have no clue in the entire world what is going on, except how to answer their cell phone. How can you teach to all of these adults without boring some and without leaving the others behind.

Andragogy consists of teaching strategies focused on adults (thank you Google).  Low and behold, us teacher folk have been teaching adults like children for years.  Who knew?  So now the question is, how to we start teaching adults like adults.  Good question...Right?

I was fortunate to hear some great information today on how to change these ways.  It really does make perfect sense that if we teach adults in the way that we want to be taught, we will get along much better (and not have things thrown at us :-)   Adults like to have choices on how they will be taught.  I know that in my school, there are several that need that one on one attention but then there are others that can easily make their way through the task with minimal assistance.

So....my take away is;

• teach adults they way that you want to be taught
• adults have background knowledge

Look it Up......(can you hear Ashton Shepherd singing???)  There's some great knowledge to be learned!!

Professional Development

Carla Smith and I presented our professional development together to two different groups of teachers; K-2 and 3-5.  We presented Class Tools to our K-2 teachers and Discovery Education to our 3-5 teachers.  As we planned, we joked about the technology level of our K-2 teachers, but they actually turned out to be a great group.  We shared a PowerPoint with them about the Class Tools website and what types of activities could be utilized.  Carla and I had both used Class Tools before and I shared an example of a Science lesson activity that I had used with my students when studying the human body.  Since Class Tools is a web-based program, we showed the K-2 teachers how to create and save a file in a Word document for use with Class Tools.  In saving the document, you could reuse the same information in different formats.  I love using the Arcade Game Generator and that's what I demonstrated to the teachers.  The teachers were able to use the web-site and provided Carla and I with immediate feed back on how they could use this site.

Since I felt comfortable using Class Tools, this presentation helped with my professional growth.  The K-2 teachers were very supportive and gave us lots of great suggestions that they would use.  If I were to repeat this presentation, I would have the teachers come with materials so that they could "make and take" useful ideas with them.

With the 3-5 teachers, we presented Discovery Education and how you can use it for so much more than videos.  We had the teachers explore and go through creating an assignment using the assignment builder.  We  delivered our initial presentation via  the Power Point presentation that was shared with us during summer Pinnacle training.  We had shared the Power Point through Google Docs and had some issues with teachers trying to sign in.  We had asked that they bring their log-in, but some log-ins did not work.  We remedied the situation by showing the entire group the agenda and notes on the Smart Board.

This presentation was more difficult than the K- 2 presentation simply because Carla and I had just learned how to use the assignment builder ourselves.  The teachers did like using Discovery Education and were surprised at what all Discovery Education had to offer.  If I were to repeat this Professional Development, I think I would have the teachers work together in PLC teams to create their assignments.

Both Professional Developments caused me to be a stronger presenter.  The sessions teach you to be prepared for all things and to think on your feet.