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Join this virtual professional learning festival

SOTW-ShareMyLesson

New virtual conference offers professional development opportunities

The American Federation of Teacher’s Share My Lesson [1] is holding its first virtual conference. Teaching & Learning: Ideas & Innovations 2014 [2] is an online festival of professional learning featuring over two dozen free workshops by Share My Lesson’s content partners, educational leaders, and expert teachers.

Held in the afternoons and evenings of March 11-13, 2014, you’ll simply log into your computer to attend these free events. There is no travel, lost class time, or any cost.

The keynote speaker is AFT President Randi Weingarten, who kicks off the conference at 6:00pm EST on Tues., March 11th with her message on Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education.

Share My Lesson is a place where educators can come together to create and share their very best teaching resources. Developed by teachers for teachers, this free platform gives access to high-quality teaching resources and provides an online community where teachers can collaborate with, encourage and inspire each other.

Share My Lesson has a significant resource bank for Common Core State Standards, covering all aspects of the standards, from advice and guides to help with dedicated resources that support the standards.

Share My Lesson was developed by the American Federation of Teachers and TES Connect, the largest network of teachers in the world.

 

How to Streamline Communications—Without Replacing Your Current Technology

Posted By ADTRAN On In Retired Whitepapers,Teaching Trends | No Comments

The variety of communications channels available to schools today has created a challenge: It’s often hard to respond efficiently to voice mail, email, faxes, texts, and other disparate messages. Unified communications (UC) technology offers a solution, but upgrading multiple systems simultaneously can be costly. Fortunately, products exist that can tie together various legacy systems in a single solution—quickly and affordably.

How to teach skills for post-school success

Posted By By Enrique Medina On In Curriculum,District Management,eClassroom News,Featured Best Practice,IT Management,Preparing Students for 21st Century Careers,Teaching & Learning,Top News | No Comments
soft-skills

Pomona USD is ensuring that students are ready for college or a career by redesigning its curriculum to include a focus on the ‘soft skills’ needed for success

Career readiness must go hand-in-hand with academic standards.

Will every student pursue higher education? Not necessarily. Should every student be prepared for and have the choice to attend college, or pursue other types of post-high school opportunities—whether it’s to attend a trade school, serve in the military, or enter the workplace? Absolutely.

College and career readiness has become an important topic of conversation across the nation as policy makers, educators, community leaders, and business professionals look for new ways to ensure all students are prepared to succeed after high school.

What makes this so imperative is that, despite our current unemployment rate of nine percent nationwide, nearly 3.2 million jobs go unfilled across all industries, because the individuals applying for these positions simply lack the required skills (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 2011).

So what are these deficiencies in skills? Some involve technical expertise, but the vast majority are known as “soft skills”: attitudinal and behavioral skills, social skills, and general workplace skills.

One thing is clear: As educators, we must face the reality that it is no longer enough to teach students to read, write, add, and subtract. The responsibility for preparing our young people with these “soft skills” falls squarely on our shoulders as well.

One size does not fit all

The “one size fits all” education model that focuses on college entry alone won’t work in today’s workforce reality. To provide true college and career readiness, we must ensure that our graduates can convey professionalism, communicate effectively, work successfully on a team, think critically, and solve problems, among other skills.

The importance of soft skills development drove us to supplement our curriculum and focus on these essential areas as well.

(Next page: How to design curriculum programs with the future in mind)

The shift began when we opted to transform our current college and career readiness standards to include an injection of best practices throughout our comprehensive high school programs.

In July 2011, the Pomona Unified School District’s Adult and Career Education Program was awarded a $50,000 grant from the California Association of Latino Superintendents and Administrators to explore, develop, and implement a program rich with soft skills training; personalized, project-based learning; and career exploration.

We chose the WIN Learning [3] Soft Skills program as the basis for our curriculum. Before launching the program, all of our adult education and occupational career technical education teachers received extensive training on how to integrate it into their classes, which include preparation for such careers as pharmacy technicians, medical and executive assistants, advanced accounting clerks, and computer operators. Later, we extended the same training to teachers in industrial technology classes, which prepare students for careers such as welding, machinists, medical billing and coding, barbering, and cosmetology.

Because of the program’s flexibility, ease of use, and relevancy, we are now in the process of expanding the soft skills curricular framework beyond our CTE elective courses and into the core curriculum delivered to all of our high school students.

The Soft Skills program’s Career Readiness courseware includes 41 competency-based online learning modules, with more than 120 hours of skills remediation per skill—totaling 1,200 hours of curriculum in ten academic and foundational skills topic areas. The topic areas range from reading for information, applied mathematics, listening, and observation to applied technology, business writing, work habits, and teamwork. Videos are integrated into the curriculum to help model these skills in the context of a work environment.

Our students can access the courseware at seven different skill levels, with their starting points determined by built-in assessments. The strength of the courseware is its precise, skills-based placements that allow our learners to be challenged, but not frustrated by work for which they are not yet ready. Post-tests at the conclusion of each module and certificates of completion tell our students and teachers they have succeeded in mastering the material.

Each student begins the coursework with a career readiness skills assessment. Students then continue with targeted online instruction via four units that often are supplemented by instructional units facilitated by classroom teachers. Teachers like the scripted, project-based learning activities that are intended to put learners into groups to work toward a common goal.

Each student is assessed on an individual basis, taking into account the quality of the product that he or she has produced—be it a PowerPoint presentation, video, or written report—and the depth of content comprehension demonstrated. Each unit ends with re-assessment to determine learning outcomes.

The courseware’s direct instruction builds and certifies workplace skills, leading to more than 26 national career readiness certifications. These portable skills credentials set our students apart by ensuring employers or college admissions counselors that a job applicant or student from the Pomona schools has the required basic skills and is ready to succeed.

With the web-based Soft Skills software, we address a wide variety of attitudinal, behavioral, and applied competency skills critical to success in today’s schools and workplaces. By adding these elements to our overall curriculum, we are making the classwork relevant to students, whether they choose college, the workplace, the military, or certification training programs.

(Next page: Unintended benefits—and next steps)

We continue to refine our program and now provide career readiness certification as a value-added component in the Career Technical Education Program. Through the Soft Skills courseware, we can also offer courses that were previously eliminated as a result of state budget cuts.

For example, budget cuts forced us to eliminate our health and safety programs, and we reduced the number of business math and English classes we offered in our executive assistant and accounting technician programs. But now, with the WIN Learning program, we can offer a host of classes online. This means our students can continue on their career pathway without interruption.

We have leveraged the same courseware in accelerating the learning of our GED students in both mathematics and language arts, again with real-world applications. And because the software is helping to bring students up to grade level in core courses, thereby eliminating the need for them to take remediation classes in math, English, or writing, we have been able to expand our elective course offerings to include business writing, applied math, applied technology, reading for information, and locating information.

The work doesn’t end with high school, however. Systemic change can only come about if all stakeholders are involved; thus, our district is a proud member of the Pomona Employment and Training Task Force, which includes representatives from the State of California Employment Development Department, Los Angeles County Work Source Center, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, the Pomona Chamber of Commerce, community colleges, and community health centers.

Our method is one that every community should pursue: Recognize that career readiness must go hand-in-hand with academic standards, and both must meaningfully prepare students for productive lives after high school.

Integrating a variety of critical attitudinal, behavioral, and applied competency skills is key to success in 21st-century classrooms and will result in greater success in 21st-century workplaces. This synergy between educators, policy makers, and business people is helping us deliver improved academic outcomes in our high schools, leading to greater options for post-secondary educational programs and better employment opportunities for all of our students.

Dr. Enrique Medina is director of career readiness for the Pomona Unified School District in California.

Take an inside look at two one-to-one deployments

Posted By By Laura Devaney, Managing Editor, @eSN_Laura On In District Management,Featured on eSchool News,IT Management,News,Teaching & Learning,Top News | 2 Comments
one-to-one

One district, one secondary school explore the ins and outs of sustaining a one-to-one initiative

One-to-one initiatives dominate today’s headlines, and the hype is both good and bad. On one hand, one-to-one rollouts can help increase student engagement and achievement as they take ownership of their learning. On the other hand, however, poorly-planned one-to-one initiatives can result in massive failures and bad publicity.

But when they’re done right, ed-tech advocates say, one-to-one programs can have a major impact on teaching and learning in schools and districts. Research shows that students with access to mobile devices during the school day, or on an in-school and take-home basis, are more engaged in their learning.

A California school district is in the middle of a long-term plan to equip all students and teachers with tablets, while at the same time ensuring proper implementation to truly impact teaching and learning.

Fresno’s Central Unified School District [4] partnered with AT&T [5] to connect its 900 teachers and staff and 15,000 students to the internet and give them tablet devices. About 40 percent of Central USD’s families are without internet access.

(Next page: How the district planned its initiative)

At the beginning of this school year, all of the district’s teachers and students received an Asus tablet. Teachers will spend a year working with their tablets in preparation for the fall of 2014, when students will receive theirs. Students will take their tablets home, use them instead of textbooks, and will also take state tests on the devices.

District leaders identified an experiential gap throughout the district, said Central USD Superintendent Mike Berg.

“That’s defined as the life experiences that kids have before they enter school,” he said. “Having or not having technology at home is a very significant impediment to kids who are trying to compete with other kids who have had that.

“We want to close that experiential gap for kids, and it’s a way to better engage kids—it’s a tool,” Berg said. “The truth is that some teachers struggle significantly to deliver differentiated instruction for students with different learning abilities and different learning levels. This is a tool with adaptive software that allows the technology to assist the teacher and reach various levels of student learning.”

This year, every teacher and instructional support staff member, including administrators and coaches, have an Asus tablet in hand and are going through a full year of professional development. Next year, the district’s 15,000 students will receive their own tablets.

Central USD is working to abandon printed textbooks, and eventually digital textbooks, in favor of giving students the skills and resources necessary to locate information that supports learning goals.

To enable that, the district partnered with AT&T to offer 4G and Wi-Fi connectivity to ensure universal access throughout the district. The company is auditing school communities to ensure that signals are strong enough to provide adequate support and speeds for devices. Every device has 4G connectivity and operates on AT&T’s 3G/4G network.

And although students do not yet have their devices, the district has updated buildings with fiber optics running to buildings and wireless access points in every classroom, with multiple access points in larger communal areas.

“We’ve calculated that we have enough to carry the load,” Berg said. “We have that 4G parallel system, so that in the event our Wi-Fi isn’t as strong as need be, the devices can default to 4G, or from 4G to Wi-Fi.”

“Preparing for this type of transition is a lot of work” said Kevin Carman, AT&T’s Education Segment Marketing director. “The way Central is doing it is a great model—they have a vision and they have buy-in. It’s a multi-year plan that encompasses the technology side and the instructional side, and it’s bringing traditionally separate groups together.”

Approaching the initiative with a plan, and not focusing on a device, is key, Carman said.

(Next page: A Canadian secondary school rolls out Samsung School)

“Initially, when tablets hit the market, there was excitement around what we could do with them in education,” he said. “You have the ‘bright and shiny’ effect—but then you had to deal with how you make it work for education. Now, we’re examining how we change instruction, and we start there, and then focus on the impact that the technology will have on the instruction and how the technology can support the plan—not the way the plan can support a specific piece of technology.”

One of the most important steps in the entire initiative, Berg said, was the first step: Defining the district’s desired outcome or goal.

“Learning doesn’t stop when the school day ends,” Berg said. “We expect them to be able to do homework, research, and interact with one another after hours and in the evening as part of the learning process—that’s what the Common Core call for, this interactive, collaborative learning.”

Samsung School

The Riverside Secondary School [6] in British Columbia began a PC-based one-to-one digital immersion program about five years ago, and last year partnered with Samsung through its Samsung School [7] initiative to pilot 31 Samsung Galaxy Note mobile devices.

“It gave us our first opportunity to work in a mobile world with students using tablets—that was different for us,” said Anthony Ciolfitto, the school’s principal. “It gave us a whole host of different challenges and excitement.”

A physics class piloted the program, in part because that particular teacher embraces technology and is not afraid to try new things, Ciolfitto said. But Ciolfitto also wanted to see how the tablets might impact learning when used for something other than word processing and basic functions.

“It’s different in a physics environment,” he said. “For the most part they’re writing and graphing and we wanted to see how those devices would work in that kind of environment.”

This past fall, Riverside used Samsung School in its science co-op program, which is a cohort of students taking chemistry, physics, math, and a work experience as a group.

“We wanted to pilot this because our goal is to become a school that’s really a one-to-one school,” Ciolfitto said. “We needed to look at how our infrastructure would work in a mobile world and see if this would support our teaching and learning goals.”

Next, the school will scale up the pilot, and also will begin a bring-your-own-device program for its ninth grade students. Planning for both of these next steps is critical.

(Next page: Important one-to-one considerations)

“Lots of things are difficult to anticipate,” Ciolfitto said. “We have 25 wireless access points in our building. When you add 300 tablets on the network, how does it operate? On the infrastructure end, we have to be thoughtful about that.” So far, he said, the school’s access points work well, and the network is able to move traffic efficiently.

Ensuring that the tablets serve a purpose, and that they aren’t present purely for the sake of being tablets, is perhaps most important.

“We’re looking at what we’re asking students to do with the device,” he said. “Does it support our learning goals? The mobile world is app-based; do students buy their own apps?”

Teachers can’t be overlooked. “Unless there’s a model put in place to build staff capacity, they’re going to fall apart,” Ciolfitto said. “We’ve seen that around the globe, whether it’s the government or a school district.”

Riverside teachers went through professional development with Samsung, and the school also offered it to out-of-district teachers who wanted to learn more about the program, Ciolfitto said. The school also tapped into existing building resources, including staff who already had embraced a technology-rich environment.

“We were fortunate because technology has been a big focus in the school,” Ciolfitto said. “This was just another dimension for us.”

Resources to engage girls in STEM learning

Posted By By Laura Devaney, Managing Editor, @eSN_Laura On In Featured on eSchool News,IT Management,STEM,STEM & STEAM,Teaching & Learning,Top News | No Comments
girls-STEM

More girls are needed in STEM fields–and engagement begins in the early grades

STEM education is important–in fact, it is essential to U.S. economic success. Today’s K-12 STEM students are tomorrow’s college STEM undergraduates and leading STEM innovators in the workforce.

Most STEM fields are traditionally male-dominated, and research has found that fostering an interest in STEM learning when students are still young makes those students more likely to pursue STEM majors and STEM careers.

Part of the trick to pulling more girls into STEM fields is getting rid of the stereotype that these subjects and careers are male-dominated. Educators, too, must encourage female students to nurture their interests in STEM fields. The stereotype that “boys are better at math” is incredibly detrimental. Having strong STEM teachers who are enthusiastic about and confident in the subjects they teach can encourage girls to get involved in STEM, too.

Following are a number of resources to help encourage girls to foster an interest in STEM learning.

(Next page: How to get girls involved in STEM)

CanTEEN [8] is a project of Carnegie Science Center’s Chevron Center for STEM Education and Career Development. In addition to learning more about STEM majors and careers, girls can sign up to meet female professionals who work in STEM fields.

The Center for Science Teaching and Learning [9] is holding the third annual Clean Tech Competition, a global engineering and design challenge for students ages 15-18. Teams from around the world compete for up to $15,000 in prizes. The project-based program engages students in STEM learning and tasks them with addressing real-world problems. Deadline for Round 1 is March 7, so hurry!

The Center for STEM Education for Girls [10] aims to increase girls’ STEM participation and encourage girls to pursue STEM careers by creating a consortium of STEM leaders who convene annually to examine best practices in bringing together girls and STEM. It also offers summer STEM experiences for girls and educators.

ForGirlsInScience.org [11] fosters girls’ interest in science in a fun and interactive way. It connects girls to women in STEM, summer camps, opportunities and careers, and more.

Girlstart [12] offers year-round K-12 STEM education programs that help girls develop STEM skills, understand why STEM is important, and learn about STEM majors and careers.

The National Center for Women and Information Technology [13] works to increase women’s participation in technology and computing. It helps recruit, retain, and advance women from K-12 and higher education through industry and entrepreneurial careers by providing community, evidence, and action.

The National Girls Collaborative Project [14] aims to connect groups throughout the U.S. that encourage girls to remain interested in, and participate in, STEM activities and careers.

Techbridge Girls [15] provides training to school districts and partners to build capacity for STEM teaching in after-school and summer programs. In addition, it works with 17 Girl Scout councils across the nation through its Girls Go Techbridge partnership.

YouthRadio [16]: This program aims to work with youth and educate them, through training and experience, in digital media and technology.

Many of these resources come from the 2012 Girl Scout Research Initiative report, Generation STEM: What Girls Say about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math [17].

The report put forth a number of recommendations to sustain girls’ interest in STEM, including:

How do students cope with self-paced blended learning?

Posted By By Peter West On In Blended Learning,IT Management,Teaching & Learning | No Comments
blended-learning

The learning rates in a vanguard self-paced blended learning course have increased dramatically, and we think we know why

A new school year. Students new to middle school from primary school. A new subject with a new pedagogy. How do students cope? Surprisingly well. The learning rates in a vanguard self-paced blended learning [18] course have increased dramatically.

Material that took eight to ten lessons when taught in a traditional fashion is now being completed successfully by some students in three to four lessons. The number of students completing the learning at this accelerated pace has also been increasing in recent years as the course and the teachers “mature.”

The increase was first noticed in 2012 when an individual or two in each class studying the topic worked at a significantly accelerated pace. This was the first time in an updated, efficient online learning environment [19] (OLE) was used. Before this a less intuitive and less effective learning management system (LMS) was used. The number of students completing the learning at an “accelerated” pace increased again in 2013; from one or two students to a handful of students in each class.

The teachers facilitating the course also became more comfortable and experienced with the self-paced blended learning model during these years. 2014 has seen the number of students working at an “accelerated pace” increase again.

(Next page: Self-paced blended learning results) The students were new to the middle school and it was a new school year. Thus, the first lesson was traditional in many ways. It involved familiarizing students with the network and the OLE and guiding students through the initial setup of individual network resources.

Students were then provided with an overview of how to work in a self-paced Blended Learning environment; something completely new to them. Hence, they could really only begin their learning experience toward the end of the first lesson. The course consisted of thirteen tutorials, each with associated activities.

The results by the end of the third lesson were surprising. The class in question was of mixed academic ability, and results in other classes were similar. The quality of understanding demonstrated by students was excellent. Current tutorial being worked on number of students in class

Table: Sample data from one class. Completed all tutorials 1

The reasons for the increased pace of learning seem to be

The rate of change and the reasons for the change will provide a rich area for future research, as we attempt to quantify the factors affecting the pace of student learning. The author also believes that this is not “accelerated learning.” Rather, it is a “natural pace of learning;” each student is free to learn at his/her pace. In a traditional class, this is not always the case. Students have always been more capable than we believe; we need to provide the environment and support to allow them to demonstrate this.

Peter West is Director of eLearning at Saint Stephen’s College in Australia. He has over 15 years’ experience leading K12 schools in technology enhanced education, particularly blended learning using online learning environments. He can be contacted at pwest@ssc.qld.edu.au [20].