Innovative Grant Data - on communicating with staff, students, and Parents.

The following is a Prezi designed to show you some of the data gathered for our grant.  IT covers the growth of technology usage in our school as well as the growth of communication through blogging, twitter, etc.  Please take the time to see this presentation.

Collaborate, Communicate and Educate on Prezi

End of the Journey

It has begun, the star of the  end of another school year and the end of the journey of Individualized Professional Development/goals for my colleagues and I at Sullivan Heights.  In 25 years of teaching and being on the Professional Development team most of those years I can honestly state that this year's "year of growth" was outstanding and extremely surprising.  Many educators have heard the research of students taking ownership of their learning.  Wang's (1980) Adaptive Learning Environment Program model was designed in part to foster personal responsibility and autonomy in students. The Learning-Team Model developed by William Glasser (1986) and the Cooperative Learning approach (Fogarty, 1990, Johnson, 1989, Kagan, 1989, 1990, and Slavin, 1989, 1990) also encourage students to take responsibility for their learning collectively.  Donald Platz in the article "Student Directed Planning Fostering Student Ownership in Learning ("Education", Vol. 114, 1994) discusses the implementation of Student Directed Planning in detail.  What I am suggesting is use the same principles in  directed Learning to teachers' learning - or in our situation we called it "Individual Professional Goals" for the school year. 

As stated in a previous article, teachers at the start of the school year selected one goal to work on, a goal that would help improve their teaching in the up and coming school year.  The premise was to work on this goal/research/learning and try to incorporate the idea/concept for at least a month.  If in a month you can see it works you would continue on researching your area of learning or you can change to a new one.  If it failed or was not what you were interested in, you could choose another goal.  This personalized learning was conducted during our Professional development days with the majority of teachers looking forward (not against) the learning day, a positive atmosphere developed for these days of learning.  The staff would get together for a motivational small clip of learning, then off they would go.  In the afternoon, we would share some of our learning, and then continue on with our goals.  Teachers on staff began to network together in the interest of their goals, in the interest of learning new areas.  Other teachers would blog and network outside of our school.  The sharing began with enthusiasm, and as you can see from this site and the links to to the side, my colleagues and I "went for it".  The learning was enthusiastic, invigorating, and just plain fun.

There were some negative aspects of this learning.  Not all members bought into the concept with the same level of enthusiasm.  Some people explored a number of areas of learning, others stayed to one or two areas and did not move.  Some ventured out without fear, some with, but in the end, when asked at the last Professional Development Day if the staff wished to continue this way, there seems to be a feeling of yes.  

So the grant that we received from our district went hand in hand with this learning concept and for the next few blog entries, the results will be posted here as "Guest Bloggers" to my site.  Please enjoy the blogs and please go forth with some aspirations and inspirations from my staff.   Although I say this is the end of a journey, it is only the end of this years learning, we will continue on at Sullivan Heights to be the "Stars" that we aspire our students to be.  Thank you.

The Wonders of Weebly

My students have been learning a number of Web 2.0 tools, photo modification, sideshows, the need for Avatars, etc.  Because of all of these different programs on different sites, we needed an area where all can be put, and that way, seeing the growth of their learning would help build confidence in students, would help them self-assess, and would help students in comparison, and analysis of different tools with the same purpose.  It is the hope that the students will be able to synthesis all these tools and come up with an analysis of which Web 2.0 tool is the best for what situation.  The  evaluation in this area is to make judgements of each tool with their own defined criteria of needs, for a specific project that is called for in any course or subject, not just my  course.

Weebly is a simple, free Web design and hosting system that takes nearly all the pain out of creating a site.  You use drag and drop features to create the pages.  As a teacher you can set up a class of 40 students, setting the user names and passwords of the students one by one, or by uploading a text file of students names, etc.  The program lets you print out all passwords and as the teacher you can lock up the web sites so no one can see the student sites unless they have a password that you set up.  This is for the security and safety of the students.  


Another excellent feature of this tool is their blog area, which you can use for critical thinking activities and also for peer assessment as there is a comment section for his area.  

Weebly has big gaps in its feature set (when dragging and dropping, sometimes the machine lags in this area and sometimes the embedding feature jams up the visual look of the site but by closing off the site and then opening it, all rights itself.  As a quick-and-dirty site host, it's not bad. I really like its simplicity. You can start by selecting a page layout from Weebly's templates (all of which look good - see above picture), or just start typing on the default template. Adding elements like pictures (via uploads or Flickr), YouTube videos, and Google maps to a page is very simple, just drag and drop the feature.  Adding pages to your site is also easy, a click of a button.   But there are some limitations in this service. You can't put a picture into a block of text after the fact--there are separate module types for text and for text-plus-image. You can't put a headline or a caption on an embedded object (like a Google map or YouTube video);  And I'm not sure about space (how many pages you are allowed).  

At present it suites our needs for our eportfolio.  We'll continue to explore this aspect, and I'll continue to assess Weebly in this blog.

Below is a YouTube video on Weebly.

Here are more Web 2.0 tools that my students will be exploring this year in Grade 9/10.  As you can see below, Google covers many of the aspects of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy with their aspects.

http://blog.kathyschrock.net/2011/03/google-tools-and-blooms-revised.html

Finally, just to see how you too can integrate some Web 2.0 tools into daily practise see the Prezi below.

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and Web 2 Tools on Prezi