always learning

Are You a Tech Pilot?

Kim Cofino — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:20:49 +0000

I’m always looking for ways to build a sustainable, job-embedded, professional development model for technology. As much as I love running after school sessions for teachers, and even with all of the fantastic opportunities we have at YIS, like COETAIL and the weekend workshops we regularly host (our next one is coming up this weekend with Andrew Churches!), I still believe the most successful PD is takes place during a regular school day. So, for the last few months, my amazing Middle School Vice Principal, Susie, and I have been working on ways that we can support our teachers at all skill and interest levels, in addition to regular coaching through the Collaboration Cycle.

Here are a few of the ideas we’ve developed:

YIS Tech Pilots

Somehow it always seems that the technology leaders in a school end up with all the extra work – helping colleagues, leading professional development sessions, testing new tools – without a lot of the reward. Since we have a great group of very tech savvy teachers at YIS, this was the first group I wanted to start with. Basically, these teachers are highly independent in their use of technology in their classroom, and are always willing to try something new, so I wanted to offer them the opportunity to share, collaborate, and connect with their like-minded colleagues from other departments – during the school day.

My hope is that we’ll meet as a team at least once a month, if not twice a month (fingers crossed) for a double block (90 mins). The plan is to spend time sharing, exploring and discussing new ideas. We don’t want it to be extra work (that’s why it’s during the school day, and they’ll be provided with cover for their classes), but we do want there to be a bit of a reward for all the extra work that these teachers are doing already. I think the sessions will take on a life of their own, once we meet for the first time, and I can imagine us talking about creating a blended learning environment through our blogging portal, bringing in elements of challenge based learning, developing globally collaborative projects with other schools, and just generally taking advantage of all of the amazing tools we have available at YIS.

We just announced the idea last week and I’ve had 10 teachers sign up. In a staff of about 40 in our MS/HS, that was exactly the number I was hoping for. Ultimately, I hope this group can become a mini-professional learning community that supports not only the members themselves, but the other teachers within their departments.

Wired Workday

Although teachers can always make appointments with the Technology and Learning Coaches, or just drop-by the office, often they are busy and just need a question answered quickly. Even though our office is very close to the Main Building (where most secondary classes are held), we’re just far enough away to stop teachers from popping by in an emergency (especially if they’re rushed). Plus, because our office is shared, sometimes it doesn’t feel like a space where you can come in and chat for an extended time.

In order to make ourselves more accessible, and provide a little more privacy for extended support, we’re starting a rotational drop-in room schedule, where one of us will be available in a very central classroom for 3 periods a week (which ends up being at least 1 period a day). We’re going to start out with open, walk-in support, and see how that goes. If we feel like people are coming in with the same questions, or we feel like people aren’t sure what to do with the time, we’ll start running themed sessions – similar to what we would do during an after school technology training.

My hope is that the teachers who are less likely to stop by the technology office (for whatever reason), will feel more comfortable dropping in an empty classroom. I like that everyone will know which periods we’ll be there – they never have to worry about coming by and us not being there, plus they don’t have to make an appointment, or plan in advance. I’m also hoping we’ll get even more insight into what topics need support, and continue building quality relationships with all of our teachers.

Faculty Meeting Tech Tips

This is the first year of our Connected Learning Community (1:1 program), and the first year of using WordPress as our learning portal – both are going extremely well, but we do have lots of learning to do as a faculty. One way we’re making time for specific technology tips is to highlight an expected us of our blogs during faculty meeting time. Instead of expecting teachers to figure out how to use their blog in the most efficient way, we’re hoping to scaffold those skills, one at a time, during required meetings.

We started by developing a list of blogging expectations for teachers, in an effort to be as clear and consistent as possible. Once we had our defined list, we started walking teachers through one item in each meeting, so that by the end of the year teachers will have successfully implemented all of these foundational skills. At the moment, I’m leading these short sessions, but we hope that our Tech Pilots can start to be the leaders as the year continues. We don’t want the technology to become a burden, and we want to leave opportunities for teachers to discover the ways that the platform works best for them, so this one-by-one approach is working really well.

In addition to the faculty meeting time, we are also scheduling regular TechTidbits and SpeedGeeking time for teachers to learn from their peers who have already implemented these ideas. Earlier this year, we found that having a specific list of skills to master (and teacher leaders for each skill) was a really effective way for teachers to build their technology efficiency.

Final Thoughts

We’re hoping that these ideas will reach the advanced, beginner and intermediate level teachers in a way that feels most comfortable to them, along with providing a network of teachers who can support each other. Ultimately, my goal is that the school builds a collaborative, supportive and engaged community of learners who take risks and try new things with technology because they know they have both the resources and the support they need.

These are just the first three ideas that we’ve started implementing, and we’re always looking for more. How do you build technology learning into the school day for all teachers? What strategies have worked for you?

Image Credits

Tech Pilots original image by Kemon01 on Flickr, licensed CC
Open by Lucca Zappa on Flickr, licensed CC
Probably the best checklist in the world by mistersnappy on Flickr, licensed CC

Mix and Match: Creating a Blended Learning Environment with WordPress and Google Apps

Kim Cofino — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 09:59:13 +0000

It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a year since we started using Google Apps for Education at YIS! Around this time last year we were still using FirstClass and just about to make the transition to Google, mainly for e-mail purposes, but in that time we’ve started to develop some great ideas for more efficiently communicating and collaborating with students, parents and teachers.

Along with Google Apps, this is the first year (starting in August) that we’ve required all teachers to have a blog on The Learning Hub (our school blogging portal). The previous two years have been voluntary, to give teachers a time to explore and see what works. Fortunately, we have a very enthusiastic staff, and they’ve seen lots of great opportunities for utilizing the blogs as a communication and learning portal for parents and students. By this time next year, we’ll be working towards blogs as e-portfolios for students, on the same platform.

Combining our use of Google Apps and our WordPress blogs on The Learning Hub has really started to create a dynamic and practical blended learning environment for our school community. Although I’m sure we still have lots of opportunity for growth, I’m really proud of what we’ve started to implement already:

WordPress Custom Menus & Categories for Efficient Blogging

Many of our teachers teach several different classes (Grade 6, 7, and 8 Humanities for example), which means that in order for a single teacher to maintain only one blog (instead of a separate blog for each class), categories are essential. We’ve been doing a great job of posting assignments in the correct category, renaming the category widget to something like “Choose Your Class” and then teaching students to always use the correct category when looking for updates. Even though this works, it’s not very pretty (categories widget being in the sidebar and all) so when the recent release of Custom Menus finally became available on our Edublogs Campus site, we were thrilled.

Now our teachers are able to achieve some consistency across all blogs with a custom navigation menu which includes the following:

An about page with a short bio of the teacher, possibly a picture
A Course Overview section with pages for each class, which include the course syllabus and basic information about the class
A Choose Your Class section, with the dropdown menu items being the categories for each individual class
An Assignments section with pages for each class, which include the larger assessment pieces and their rubrics
A Calendar section with pages for each class which include an embedded Google calendar of assignment deadlines (see below)
A Resources section with collaborative depart-based resources like MYP Criteria, helpful documents, and useful resource lists (see below)

It sounds simple, but the ability to mix pages and categories (and any custom links) into the menu bar (let alone being able to add a menu bar to any blog theme) really makes the blogs easy to navigate, and allows our teachers to use the natural organization structure of the blogging platform to it’s fullest. The one thing we’re really struggling with at the moment is that many blog themes on Edublogs do not actually show the full category in the category archives (so far we’ve tested about 50 themes and only 20 of them show the full category – frustrating).

Collaborative Google Calendars for Easy Communication

One of my favorite thing about Google Calendars is that they can be collaborative, so that more than one person can have the rights to create and manage events on a single calendar. Plus, that collaborative calendar can then be embedded anywhere on the web! Last week we took this to a new level at YIS by creating collaborative calendars for each grade level in the middle school.

Every teacher that teaches grade 7 for example, now has one single calendar to add assessment tasks. The homeroom teacher for the class (7A for example) creates one calendar and gives admin rights to all the other 7A teachers. Now everyone who teaches 7A can add their assessment events to this one calendar (plus, if the assessment description is online, they can easily attach or embed the assessment right there into the calendar event). From there, we embedded the calendar into every teachers’s class blog, so the students can view the assignments there, subscribe to the calendar themselves (or their parents), or embed the calendar into their own blog. Of course, this also provides the additional benefit of allowing teachers to get a birds’ eye view of assessment deadlines for a single group (always something I’ve seen schools try to do, but never seems to work out).

When students and parents subscribe to this calendar they can:

see a model of how to effectively use Google Calendar to keep track of events and organize important assignments
set up the type of reminders that are convenient for them (automated e-mail, pop-up or text message)
always know what is due and when – for every class, from one central place
with one click, see the attached assignment sheet for this particular event

Because this will only work for middle school (given the way our classes are scheduled), we hope this will provide a foundational skill for student to manage their busy course loads independently in high school.

Sharing & Collaborating with Google Docs

YIS started using Google Docs for curriculum mapping two years ago, and teachers are really starting to get into how they can use Google Docs with students. We’re starting to see teachers create things like:

Student Resources Collections: Teachers create a collection for all related course documents. All students in the course are shared on this collection in “view only” mode. Any time a document is needed, the teacher can just organize it into any (or all) of the collections for their classes. If it’s an assignment students need to complete, they can make a copy, re-name it and start editing. This means that documents are always updated, always available, and in multiple places at once (no need to make several copies of the same document any more).
Student Drop Boxes: Each student creates their own collection for the course, then shares with the teacher. All assignments for the course are then placed inside this collection, as soon as the document is placed in this collection, it’s shared with both the student and the teacher (no extra e-mails needed).
Collaborative Resource Collections within departments: When an entire department collaborates on resources for students, they are choosing to share the whole collection with all the students, organized by grade level and subject area. The math department has an entire set of documents to support learning in grades 6 – 12 which is shared with the entire secondary school. Talk about organized!
Collaborative Resource Collections across departments: Often resources from one department can be useful in another, those documents can be shared with multiple departments from one place. For example, resources on how to cite sources properly can be shared from the Library, but available in every subject area’s resources.
Published, Linked or Embedded Documents: Once documents are created and shared with students, teachers are also setting them to be publicly viewable and then linking them on their blog – this allows the parents (and wider audiences) to see what students are learning too. Of course, students are also creating documents and sharing them on their blogs as well.
Collaborative Notes: Instead of asking every student to take notes in class, teachers are starting to ask several students to collaborate on one document for the day’s notes, then sharing and linking (or embedding) on their blog for the whole class to use.

Google Sites to Organize Resources

Even though I really prefer wikis (and especially wikispaces) for easy website creation, we’ve been making good use of Google sites to create effective and easy to navigate resource sharing websites for students and teachers. We have a site for all of our curriculum documents, our upcoming CIS/NEASAC accreditation, PD opportunities and appraisal process. Our amazing administrative staff have built Google Sites for our school handbook and policy documents. Several departments have built Google Sites as a way to collect, collaborate on and share all relevant resources for their classes in one central place (which of course can now be linked in the custom menus on their blogs). Of course almost all of these documents are actually created in Google Docs, so just making them public, and then organizing and linking them on a Google Doc makes them so easy to find.

Google Reader Bundles

Although we can’t seem to get Reader to show up in the top menu on our Google Apps (anyone know how to edit this?), we have taught all of the students and teachers how to use Google Reader to manage all of the blogs they are reading. To be even more efficient, we’re going to:

Have all homeroom teachers create a bundle for their class that any teacher who teaches the same group can subscribe to.
Have all students create a bundle for all of their teachers that their parents can subscribe to.
Teach parents how to use Google Reader (on the agenda for next month’s Parent Technology and Literacy Coffee Morning)

This is the first step in helping teachers and students more efficiently access the work being shared on the blogs, but eventually I’m going to need to figure out how to get RSS for categories working properly – that way teachers and students can subscribe to only the posts they want (and not just everything new from that blog).

One-Stop-Shop

We’ve worked really hard to take the best from both of these core platforms that we’re using to develop a blended learning environment for our community, but we want to make the implementation as seamless as possible for everyone. So, we are streamlining everything into one central space: The Learning Hub. From the main page, students can access every single web-based service that we provide (from logging in to their student blog, to their GApps, to VoiceThread, to our CLC Handbook). We hope that this makes it easier for students to make effective use of all the tools, and that it helps cut down on confusion of “where do I go to do X?”

Final Thoughts

We are well on our way to creating an effective, easy-to-navigate, collaborative learning environment that makes the most out of the two core platforms that we’ve chosen to use at YIS. But what’s really exciting is that there’s still so much more to learn. While Chris Betcher was recently here for our EARCOS Weekend Workshop, The Networked Educator, I learned about Google Moderator, some of the amazing ways that you can collaborate with Google Maps, and some fantastic search features that I never knew existed. I know there are tons of other fantastic tools that we can be using, I’m so glad that we’re taking the time to really understand how these two rich platforms work. Whenever I get the complaint that a teacher doesn’t like the blogs or Google Apps and I ask why not, that feature is always there, just waiting to be discovered.

Image Credits:

Exocet by me’nthedogs’ on Flickr, Creative Commons Licensed
Balcony by MorBCN on Flickr, Creative Commons Licensed

Advice from an Expert: Dr. Mary Hayden on Measuring 1:1 Sucess

Kim Cofino — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 07:57:59 +0000

Last year, YIS implemented a Visiting Scholars Program, which basically means that YIS is willing to host educational researchers looking to conduct research in an international school context. Naturally, our very first visiting scholar was Dr. Mary Hayden, the leading expert, author and researcher on international schools. (Can you tell I’m a big fan? I have all her books – which I did, embarrassingly, tell her the first time I met her. Yet another geek moment, for sure.)

It was wonderful to have Mary at our school, not only because she is so knowledgeable about international schools and offered several sessions for our community (notes and resources), but also because she was always willing to stop and chat, and offer her excellent advice. I had several great conversations with her while she was here, and one, more formal, meeting with our Connected Learning Community team that I think is worth sharing here.

Tips for Measuring Success

At the end of last year, which was when Mary was at YIS, we were just in the final stages of planning for our Connected Learning Community implementation, and foremost on our mind (once the practicalities were out of the way) was how we could evaluate the success of the program. Mary’s extensive experience in research gave us a great foundation to start from, and our conversation produced several key ideas to implement:

Create a list of goals/desired results in practicalities, based on our Vision for the CLC (here’s how we developed our vision). Remember to focus on not just technology, but habits, including: social and emotional wellness, and digital citizenship.
Create an audit or survey to determine if we’ve met those goals, consider running this at the beginning, (middle?) and end of the year to see where we’ve started from, as well as where we’ve gone.
Create a form/format for all stakeholders to regularly record what they’ve seen based on the desired results – basically a way for us to continually gather evidence about our successes and challenges through multiple perspectives.
Develop a case study group, to ensure regular reflection and feedback with a specific group composed of students, teachers and parents (similar to the team that worked together to develop our program).
Add software to image that tracks when students are online and what they’re doing – we can ask students to run the software during orientation. (What does this mean for student privacy?)
Use student blogs as a record of their development, interest and use of technology tools to connect, communicate, share and collaborate.
Try some experiments: for example: run parallel classes: same class – one with tech, one without – to see the impact that technology is having on a day-to-day basis. Or use text messaging to see how students are using text messaging (What are you doing now? What do you think about what you’re doing?)

At this point, we haven’t implemented any of these ideas yet, and I’m sharing them here as a way of reflecting and reminding myself of what’s important while we are in the early stages of implementation. We are two weeks away from our mid-semester break, and I hope to bring together a case study group after we return, refreshed and relaxed for the second half of our first semester. Ideally, this group can not only provide much-needed feedback from multiple perspectives, but also act as a mini-steering committee for the program as we continue.

I’m sure our planning team would have come up with several of these ideas on our own, but we wouldn’t have known which would be most effective, where to start or why they are so important. Having a chance to sit and discuss these plans with someone as experienced in successful research as Mary was priceless for us. And, I know she was excited to learn about the ways that technology connects us, and how the use of technology is changing the international school experience.

This is why the Visiting Scholar program is so amazing: it brings respected and brilliant researchers and educators into our school community, enabling us to push our own thinking forward and open new doors to authentic conversations and learning opportunities within our broader community; plus it gives researchers who may not otherwise have an opportunity to spend an extended amount of time in a school like ours to see things from a slightly different perspective, exactly that.

Final Thoughts

It was so exciting to plan for the implementation of this program, that I’ve just been enjoying how smoothly things have gone since we started. I haven’t forgotten the importance of the evaluation stage (how could I, after all these years of teaching MYP Technology?) but I did need a little bit of time to get my head around the finer details of the program that we’ve been working out for the last few weeks (more on those later). So, the more advice, the better: How have you evaluated the success of your school’s 1:1 program? How would you recommend we start?

And of course, if you’re a researcher, or you know someone who is, and you/they would like to work in an international school context, please take a look at the program and submit an application.

Image Credits

CLC Handbooks by superkimbo on Flickr, Creative Commons Licensed
Pinboard by midiman on Flickr, Creative Commons Licensed

Learning Together at Learning 2.011

Kim Cofino — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 02:35:24 +0000

It’s hard to believe another Learning 2.0 conference has come and gone. Yet again, the organizers created an innovative and engaging learning environment. It’s fantastic to watch how this conference has evolved from year to year, and just continues to get better and better. Personally, I thought this year was the best yet. Here’s why:

Cohorts of Learners

This is the second year in a row that Learning 2.0 has followed a cohort model for part of the conference. I love the idea of spending a set chunk of time with a set group of participants. To me, this adds another layer of learning, connections, and conversations to an already very learner-focused event.

Last year the conference was organized so that we had just cohort time and unconference time, which was a little tricky. I felt, as a cohort leader, that I was responsible for teaching all the things that participants could have possibly learned in a presentation session, and I think the participants felt a bit like they didn’t really know what to do with the unconference time. This year, the amount of time in cohorts was reduced, and additional presentation time was added, for a fabulous trifecta of cohorts, presentations and unconference time. It’s so important to keep that presentation time – not only does it encourage other participants to present, but it showcases the amazing things that are going on in schools all around Asia. I think this year was a perfect balance of all three formats.

The cohort concept is also fantastic because it provides a lens through which the participants can view the conference. This gives a focus to what participants are learning and allows dedicated time to discuss and reflect on everything they’ve seen. This year I was asked to lead a cohort called Authentic Assessment and Digital Media. Thankfully, I (once again) had a superstar partner, David Larson (last year I had the privilege of working with Darren Kurropatwa), because it was a challenging topic to facilitate. For starters, I read the title and thought: “Fun! Project Based Learning and Multimedia! We can share ways that we’re transforming our classroom to bring in the design process and authentic student-led projects!” But, on the first evening, when I asked participants what they were looking for, they said things like:

Strategies for formative assessment
Revising rubrics
How to ensure that technology skills are being mapped and assessed
How to assess technology standards
How to map technology standards

Of course, all of these things are very important, but it wasn’t quite the vision I had for the cohort – especially given the fact that there were 50 people from at least 40 different schools, all at different places and with different standards and expectations. So, we did our best to share our ideas, allow others to share theirs, and to provide time to work together to answer some of the questions the brought with them to the conference. I think (hope) they walked away with something useful, and I certainly learned a lot.

A few highlights for me were:

We need time to re-frame what we’re talking about. Why are we doing the things we’re doing? Finding a few really great articles and allowing time for participants to read, and then jigsaw back to a new group where everyone read a different article is a very effective way to do this.
It was clear that participants really wanted (and needed) time to share what they are doing in their schools, challenges they face, and solutions or opportunities they could take advantage of (we did a SpeedGeeking session and a department-focused session to facilitate this)
Formative assessment is a big challenge for teachers – we need some quick and easy strategies that teachers can implement, especially in a 1:1 environment (lots of good ideas about this for another post)
The MYP Design Cycle (or any kind of design process) really does fit for any subject, but it takes time and teachers need help understanding that a technology-rich project that’s done thoroughly usually means more time, rather than less (we need to stop saying “make a movie about this for homework”).
Almost every participant in the cohort was either in a 1:1 school, or their school was moving in that direction. Most had heard of the ISTE NETS standards and were applying them in some form at their school. Everyone had a positive story to share about the use of technology in their school – although they were all at very different levels.

I’m still struggling with:

People still like to watch presentations. Some of the feedback from our session was that David and I didn’t do any formal presenting. I thought that was a good thing, but clearly I need to find a way to strike a balance between teaching directly (while modeling good presentation skills), and facilitating discussion.
I need to remember to always, always, always highlight student work. I tend to get caught up in the abstract and big ideas, but teachers really appreciate concrete examples. In retrospect, I could have easily brought out student samples of work, rubrics I’ve used, and unit planners I’ve created and we could have deconstructed them (it’s not like I didn’t have them with me!). Then participants could have done the same with student work from their schools. It is so obvious, yet somehow I missed it. (Now I want to run the same topic again and do it better!)
How to walk the fine line between focusing on tools and why we use the tools. Teachers seem to like being “wowed” with so many tools they couldn’t possibly absorb them all, but often are reluctant to talk about the bigger concepts of a changing classroom environment, or a media-rich world, or critical skills for the future, because those topics aren’t “practical”. I do believe teachers need to know what tools are out there, but I think knowing what they want to do with the technology and why they want to do it is so much more important. To me, just demoing a bunch of tools feels like eating too much candy, fun and sweet and exciting at the start, but after a while you get a stomach ache. Where’s the nutrition?

I was honored to be asked to lead this cohort, and humbled by the topic and the wealth of knowledge in the room when I met my participants. Thank you to everyone involved for pushing my thinking and helping me become a better cohort leader!

Connections

I love that feeling when you get to meet people you’ve been learning with for years online, in person. It’s amazing that you can kind of “skip to the good stuff” right away because you already know each other from so many different forms of communication. This conference has to be my absolute favorite for those kinds of connections. Walking into our cohort leaders planning session and seeing Wes Fryer, Rod Lucier, Darren Kurropatwa, George Couros, Alec Couros, Jess McCulloch, Kevin Honeycutt, Anne Mirstchin, Jeff Utecht, Julie Lindsay, Ann Krembs, Jabiz Raisdana, Jarrod Robinson, Toni Erni, Gail Lovely, Charlotte Diller, Sheldon Bradshaw, Michael Boll, and the amazing conference organizing team, is quite the buzz.

What’s even better is that when we did our mini-keynotes, all of our ideas built upon one another – and there was no collaborative planning for these presentations, no discussion of what we would do before we got on stage. We’re all thinking about the same things, and when we get together, we can get right down to talking about “doing bigger stuff” (as Jess likes to say). And on top of all that, getting the chance to see the wonderful people that are such an integral part of my personal learning network all together in the same place just can’t be beat! These connections are what it’s all about.

Momentum

It is amazing to come back year after year to this conference and see how teachers and schools are moving forward. Seeing former participants come back as unconference leaders, former unconference leaders come back as presenters, and former presenters come back as cohort leaders is fantastic! This conference has become a community of learners that connects and reconnects in many ways, and we’re all continually pushing ourselves and our schools forward. I love working in Asia because of this feeling of momentum we have, it’s contagious and it spreads from school to school as our teachers move around and share their learning.

I like to tease my good friend Jabiz about being my first protégé (sorry BZ), but all I did was give him a ball (in this case the ball was WordPress instead of Dreamweaver) and he ran with it. Same goes for Dana Watts (formerly at ISB), and Rebekah Madrid and Zoe Page (here at YIS). We had a few conversations here and there, and before I knew it, they were running with that ball so fast, doing new things in inspiring ways. It’s such a pleasure to come to a conference like this and see all of them together, knowing that there are groups of people all over the venue with the same kinds of stories and connections. We’re all moving forward together.

I’m especially proud to have brought a team of teachers from YIS to the conference this year too. Having a group of us at the conference, spending time thinking about these big ideas together, and then being able to share them back at school, is just one of the many ways the momentum continues to spread. Thanks for coming Zoe, Rebekah , Elif, Brian and Trevor! Looking forward to bringing this energy and enthusiasm back to YIS throughout the year.

Final Thoughts

Thanks Learning 2.011 team for inviting me back another year. It’s truly an honor to be part of the community that you have created. I’m already looking forward to Learning 2.012!

Image Credits

Group Project Time by superkimbo on Flickr
Authentic Assessment by superkimbo on Flickr
#summercamp4life by Clint Hamada on Flickr
Kim and the Protégés by Clint Hamada on Flickr
YIS Crew 4 by Clint Hamada on Flickr

On my way to work

Kim Cofino — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:25:24 +0000

Thanks to Jess McCulloch for tagging me with this fun post idea. I decided to be a little creative and re-use some older pictures that I’ve already shared via Instagram, Twitter or Flickr, combined with a few recent ones. One of the highlights of living in Japan is that we have 4 distinct seasons, so here’s a glimpse of my daily “commute” (a 10 minute walk) through the seasons:

I start my mornings with a moment on the balcony, enjoying the breezes and (mostly) sunny skies, and the view of Yokohama harbor:

This one is from the day after a major typhoon. What a difference a day makes!

After heading downstairs (we live on the 9th floor of a 22 story building), we cross this busy street. Thankfully the crossing signals are unusually long in Japan so we rarely have to wait. Some days, I get extra lucky and I get to walk to work with a friend:

Then we take a short stroll across the canal:

and then up the steps:

through a little park with some super cool trees:

and an interesting statue (that I still don’t know the meaning behind):

and across the adorable mini-bridge:

And we’re there:

Of course, if the weather is not so great, or we’re feeling lazy, we take the escalator up the hill instead of the stairs:

which leads us through a short walk through yet another park:

Plus, if we go that way, we’re rewarded with a fantastic view of Mt. Fuji (on clear days):

And some stunning sunsets on the way home:

I must admit, I love my commute! What does yours look like Chris Betcher, Clint Hamada, Chrissy Hellyer, Brian Lockwood, Keri-Lee Beasley, Dana Watts and anyone else who wants to play along?

The Great Design Challenge: Introducing the MYP Design Cycle

Kim Cofino — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 09:28:07 +0000

Once again, I’m teaching grade 6 MYP Technology. This is my absolute favorite class to teach, and I’m looking forward to another fun year with our wonderful new sixth graders.

One thing is very different this year, though. For the first time, ever, in my teaching career, I have a colleague who also teaches MYP Technology that I can collaborate with! In the past, I’ve always been the only middle school technology teacher, but this year, I am very fortunate to work with Damien Pitter, who will be teaching grade 7 MYP Technology at YIS.

We’re starting off the year by introducing the MYP Technology Design Cycle in a fun way, through a 30-minute design challenge, one variation for grade 6 and something a little different for grade 7. Usually I like to bring in hands-on, non-tech, activities in various places throughout the year to focus on the concept of the design process and this is going to be the first experience for this group.

Here’s the plan, with a *huge* thanks to Damien (I ♥ collaboration): The Great 30-Minute Design Challenge

Start the lesson with a quick discussion about the difference between art and design, helping students understand the fact that design must include function and not only appearance. Then, introduce the challenge. For grade 6, they will be designing and creating a house of cards using only the materials provided (recycled index cards and tape). They will have 30 minutes to use whatever resources they have to learn how to create a house of cards (including their friends and their laptops, if needed), and to successfully create their house.

As they go through the process of creating their house, they will document (on this simple table, created by Damien) each step in their process. During the challenge, students may ask questions and help each other, but in the end, they must each create their own house.

After 30 minutes, we’ll do a short “Gallery Walk” to look at everyone’s houses. A class discussion about which houses have great design, which met the design specifications and which were most successful will follow. Ideally, this will prompt some thought about how to design: thinking about who you’re designing for, what the purpose is for your design, what will determine the success or failure of your design, and how effectively follow a process from beginning to end to ensure that your designs are meeting all of those needs.

Finally, we’ll talk through the various stages of the MYP Design Cycle in terms of this task, understanding the importance of each step. Students will fill in the table they started earlier by using the second column to label which stage of the Design Cycle they were doing for each step – even if they’re completely out of order. Hopefully this will prompt some class reflection about how important the process is, why each stage comes when it does in the Cycle, and help build their understanding of how they can apply it to all subject areas.

Final Thoughts

I’m excited to see how this lesson will turn out. Damien did his version last week (the grade 7 students designed a “Wanted” poster for their 30 minute challenge) and he said it prompted some great discussion. I’m kind of surprised I’ve never done a short introduction like this before. I think it’s because the Design Cycle seems so natural to me that I’ve never thought about it needing a specific overview lesson, but I’m sure this will help my students understand the purpose and structure of this course so much better. Maybe it’s just me, but I love the fact that this class focuses on the process over the product. Understanding how to manage a project, how to design for others (or yourself) and how to reflect on your own work is such valuable learning.

As Damien and I were discussing this activity, we kept coming back to the idea that the Design Cycle is visible in every subject area, like the writing process in English and the scientific method in, well, science, which is why I always use the Design Cycle when integrating technology into the classroom. One of my goals for this class ia always to help them see those connections more naturally, and to be able to be more effective “project managers” through their understanding of the design process. Hopefully, now that we’re moving MYP up through the middle school, there will be more opportunity for collaboration between departments to highlight these connections.

Oh, and by the way, how awesome is it to have a colleague who teaches the same thing as you?!

Do you teach MYP Technology? How do you introduce the concept of the Design Cycle to your students?

Image Sources, Creative Commons Licensed, Found on Flickr

MYP Technology Design Cycle shared by superkimbo
Building Castles in Spain by Ester Gibbons
Intersecting Cables by David Paul Ohmer

Tech Tidbits: Increasing Teachers’ Digital Efficiency

Kim Cofino — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 07:01:54 +0000

Phew! This has been quite a week! Our CLC (1:1) Orientation went amazingly smoothly, thanks to all of the wonderful YIS colleagues involved, and now all of our students in grades 6 – 12 (around 400) have their own laptop! I’ve been getting emails, chats and FB updates all weekend about how happy the students are with their new MacBook Pros. I absolutely can’t wait to see where this new adventure takes us as a school community over the next year.

As I was designing the orientation sessions for students, particularly the session on Managing Your Laptop, one thing jumped out at me: understanding how to be digitally efficient can make the difference between loving your laptop and constant frustration. I mean, if you know how to use CMD/CTL+F to find what you’re looking for on any page, in any application, you’re generally going to be a lot more efficient and effective with your time than someone who’s constantly scrolling up and down multiple pages to find the one word they’re looking for (and sadly, that appears to be 90% of computer users).

So, I guess the question then becomes, what are the key skills everyone (students, teachers and parents) need to be efficient? Especially when technology is always changing? And, isn’t each person’s concept of productivity and efficiency different? So wouldn’t the skills be different depending on the person and their work flow?

I’ve pondered this idea before, and even tried to make up a list of implicit technology skills that we can explicitly teach to help students and teachers feel more confident in any new application. Those skills were more general, focused on understanding how applications work, and how to transfer knowledge from one to another. This time I wanted to focus on day-to-day tasks, skills that would help our students and teachers feel more productive, and that would enable their laptops to work for them.

Because we ran two sessions, one for students and one for teachers (technically it was way more than 2, but all of the sessions for the students had the same list of skills), I tried to make sure the skills overlapped as much as possible. It will certainly be helpful for the teachers to know how to support the students, and all of these skills are foundational for more advanced strategies to help everyone be more productive.

Essential Productivity Skills

For the most part, I focused on Google Apps, especially Gmail, Docs, and Calendar, because those are the tools that make my life so much easier on an average day. Here’s the list:

Creating labels in Gmail
Creating e-mail lists in Contacts
Install Google Notifier to set up web Gmail as your default email client (this has saved me hours of work)
Creating collections in Google Docs and organizing your files
Making a copy of a document & saving for yourself (to edit)
Sharing a collection with a group (made in your Contacts list) or a colleague
Make a Google Doc public, for linking on your class blog
Check the revision history in a Google Doc
Creating events in Google Calendar and setting automatic reminders via e-mail
Creating repeating events in Google Calendar
Importing the school’s calendar into your own Google Calendar
Creating a Google Reader account and subscribing to feeds
Create a bundle of feeds in Reader for each class you teach
Adding feeds to folders in Reader
Recording screencasts in QuickTime

These are super basic, but for those who don’t know how to do them, I imagine there’s a lot of frustration and wasted time. Just like the people desperately scanning page after page for the one thing they’re looking for. My hope is that once teachers and students are able to build these simple skills into their everyday workflow, they will be ready for the next set.

Tech Tidbits Format

To help teachers learn the skills they needed (and not have to sit through the ones they already know) in a more comfortable environment, the session was run kind of like a fair. Fifteen different teachers were seated around the room to teach each of the different items above. We had a shared Google Doc listing the topics and the trainers for the day and teachers were able to work in partners (or independently) and move around the room to the session they needed at that time (basically a variation of SpeedGeeking).

After a few minutes, new tables started opening up with teachers training their colleagues on the new things they had learned. Anyone who felt confident that they could teach one of the skills was able to write their name down on the Google Doc so that other teachers, who may not have had a chance to learn everything, would know who to go to for support. There is also a growing list of new ideas at the bottom of the document for future sessions.

Over the year I’d like to offer a number of these sessions, allowing different teachers to do the training, and building up a repertoire of productivity skills that anyone can combine to suit their needs. It’s fun, it’s quick, it’s easy and everyone walks away with something useful they can implement immediately. Over time, as the skills become more complex and interdependent, I think (hope) teachers will see how all of these tools can be combined together to make their lives easier.

Building Expertise

Another side benefit of this format of PD is that each time we run a session like this, I’ve promised the day’s trainers a special workshop with me to demo all of the skills covered (because they may not have had the time to visit other tables) and to build up to the next level of skills. Hopefully, this will not only spread the knowledge base across the school, but will also entice more teachers to offer training sessions. By the end of the year, I hope we have a set of teacher experts, along with our Student Tech Team experts, that is continually expanding and changing as needs arise. Although this is focused on technology skills, I hope this can be a start to developing an environment of professional learning, along with our YIS COETAIL cohort.

Final Thoughts

From what I’ve heard, the session was well-received and teachers would like more sessions like this. I love the idea of not being the only person leading technology training at school, and making our PD a community experience, rather than a departmental show off. Now that everyone in the middle and high school has their own computer, I think these kinds of skills will be more essential and help us spend more time on the creative and fun aspects of technology.

What would be on your Tech Tidbits list?

Image Credits: Creative Commons Licensed

Checklist by adesigna on Flickr
celebrations by mike_tn on Flickr

A 1:1-derful Start

Kim Cofino — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 11:58:51 +0000

Another school year is about to begin! And, I must admit, I am even more excited this year than I usually am! After a busy year planning with our amazing teachers, parents, students, administrators at YIS, along with fabulous colleagues around the world, we are finally ready begin our 1:1 laptop program, called the Connected Learning Community (CLC).

Since we’re a small school, we’ll be implementing the program from grades 6 – 12 in one go (13″ MBPs), and we have come up with some unique and fun ideas for starting this school year off in a special way.

Two Days of Orientation

Instead of starting our year with a standard assembly and regular classes, we have planned out two full days of non-formal school, similar to a university orientation (huge thanks to Rebekah for the idea!). Although many of the sessions will be focused on topics related to the CLC, we’ve also planned in time for cross-grade level team building, fun getting-to-know you activities, and other important start of the year events. We hope that it will go so well that we’ll run this kind of orientation every school year.

Our fantastic counsellor, Adam, and I have been working on developing creative and active sessions that will introduce our most important CLC-related concepts to our middle and high school students. We want to make sure the sessions allow lots of time for discussion and deeper understanding of the content, as well as provide opportunities for students to work together and get to know each other.

Here’s what we’ve come up with:

CLC Introduction: This mock-trial session is intended to help students understand their rights and responsibilities as part of the CLC. Students will be split into 10 groups and asked to role-play courtroom scenarios based on our Responsible Use Agreement (created with student, teacher, admin and parent input). Each group will need to come up with a ruling which reflects the RUA, to be shared with the whole class at the end of the session. For example:

You’re using the YIS Humanities Facebook page to complete your assignment for Ms. Madrid, when a notification pops up that another classmate (in this class) has commented on one of your photos (unrelated to this project). Without thinking, you click the notification tab and Ms. Madrid catches you. What is your fate?

Digital Citizenship Introduction: This session is intended to help build a consistent understanding of appropriate online behavior across the school. To introduce the idea, we’ll show a short clip from Arrested Development, “Pier Pressure“, where some of the characters are “taught a lesson” in an over-the-top way (watch it, it’s hilarious). After the short clip, students will be split into groups of four, to create their own over-the-top “lessons” based on our RUA and digital citizenship expectations. Ideally, each group will then be able to act out their scenario (but we may run short on time).

Finding Balance: Adam has developed this session to focus on understanding how easily we can fall out of balance. Students will start the lesson by playing a balancing game in partners, where each student stands on a spot and they hold and pull a rope to try to get their partner to fall off. Afterwards, they will discuss the types of strategies they developed to help maintain their equilibrium, and how they can apply that to the choices they make about how they spend their time. It will also be important to discuss the expectation that no computers will be allowed during break, and that only students with school-work will be allowed to use their laptops during lunch (in a designated room, with a teacher supervisor).

Managing Your Laptop: This session is intended to introduce students to a variety of productivity techniques in a very short amount of time (e.g. making a repeating event in Google Calendar or backing up your laptop). For this session, every student will have their new laptop (and our CLC Handbook) with them, so they can immediately implement the skills they learn. Students will work in partners or small groups to complete a list of “challenges” using any and all resources available to them. As they complete each challenge, they can record the steps or the resource they used. In case they can’t solve one of the challenges with their team, they will also have three “lifelines” they can use: asking a technician, collaborating with another group, or checking with the facilitator. By the end of the lesson, all students should have at least 10 new tricks they can use to be more effective with their laptop, and a list of helpful resources they can go to when they need it.

Teacher Training

In addition to the work we’re doing with students on those first two days of school, we’ve also scheduled extra time for teachers to build their skills. During the three teacher work days before school starts we have time set aside to understand and discuss the Responsible Use Agreement, to continue building classroom blogs (required for teachers this year), and hands-on support for our other tech tools (especially Google Apps). Of course, we have tons of PD planned for the rest of the school year too, so the training doesn’t end this week.

Also, both orientation school days will be shorted, to end at 2:30, to give us about 2 hours of PD time at the end of the day, focusing on Digital Citizenship and Managing Your Laptop. Those two sessions will follow almost exactly the sessions that we’ve planned for students, but with a few subtle shifts to make them more appropriate for teachers.

Digital Citizenship Introduction: teachers will complete the activity almost exactly as described above (for students), but without the acting (nobody needs that kind of pressure on the first day of school). We’ll just share the scenarios each group creates and discuss them as a faculty. We’ll also introduce our new Digital Citizenship curriculum, Digital Dragons, to the staff, which will be implemented in the middle school this year.

Managing Your Laptop: Similar to the student session above, teachers will be given a set of important skills to learn. Instead of having to figure it out completely on their own, we will have stations set up around the room with “lead teachers” who can demo the skill quickly (like a modified SpeedGeeking session). The teacher list will include at least 15 items and teachers can work in partners (or independently) to complete at least 10. We’ll keep a Google Doc open for those who feel confident about the skills they learn to add their name, so that after the session is over, teachers can ask anyone on the list to teach them anything they didn’t have time to learn. The goal is to make the session active and fun, to spread the tech leadership to as many staff members as possible, and to build a list of helpful resources for teachers to return to anytime.

Parent Presentations

In order to formally introduce the CLC to all parents, we’ll be offering two presentations focused on the vision and history, laptop details, and family responsibilities, as well as time for Q&A. The HS parent session will be optional, and held on the Wednesday evening before school starts, and the MS parent session will be mandatory, and held on the second day of school. The outcome of both sessions is a signed RUA and Laptop Agreement Policy, so that students are ready to pick up their laptops.

Final Thoughts

I am so excited to see how this orientation goes! I hope students, parents and teachers are engaged and learning, and enthusiastic for the year to come. I’m sure there will be glitches along the way, but so far, I am really happy with the way things are shaping up.

For those of you already in 1:1 schools, are we missing anything? Do you have any advice for us as we begin this adventure? Anything we shouldn’t forget to do?

Image Credits (CC License)

Blogs as Showcase Portfolios

Kim Cofino — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 10:03:56 +0000

I am a huge advocate of blogs as ongoing, reflective portfolios of student work. After using them with students for the last six years in a variety of formats in three different schools, in my opinion, they are the perfect container for sharing, organizing and reflecting on student learning.

For starters, they are so amazingly easy to use. I’ve used blogs with students as young as third grade and it really only takes one lesson for them to understand the basics. Once they get the hang of posting, organizing their work in categories is a breeze and adding links and media are natural next steps. Plus, the inherent organizational structure (categories and tags), if used properly, makes it extremely easy and quick to find anything. The hardest part is ensuring that students remember to organize their posts.

In addition to the ease of use, the accessibility of connecting with other learners around the world, since work is online and easy to comment on, makes blogs a straightforward tool for building a global classroom. Considering how often our students move (usually every two years) the portability of a blog is another strong point. It couldn’t be easier to export a WordPress blog from one school’s MU to another or to the online wp.com. Finally, there’s the fact that blogs are so popular in the “real world” that they have immediate relevance to today’s media landscape.

So I was very happy that YIS had an existing blogging portal, The Learning Hub, (set up by Colin and Brian last year) when I arrived last August. However, the blogs were still so new this year that students are continuing to produce paper “folios”. Although they sound like they could be old-school portfolios, they’re actually more like folders full of tests. Not my favorite way to share and reflect on student work, but that’s a whole different issue – and one we’re working on.

This year I’ve been working, mostly with our middle school teachers, to help students utilize their blogs as a tool to share and reflect on their learning, as well as to help them connect to other classes around the world. Also, because I teach sixth grade MYP Technology, I have more time to help them develop their blogs more fully. So, in addition to helping our teachers understand how students can use them (and how they, as teachers can use them as a central portal for their classes), I’m running my own little pilot project for very simple showcase portfolios.

Basically, all I would like students to do is reflect on their goals for the year and share pieces of work that are important to them. So far, so good. The only challenge is that because blogging is relatively new here, students don’t have as much of their work already on their blogs as I would like. But that will continue to improve year after year.

Here’s the (very) simple assignment I gave my class last week (they’ve had around an hour to work on their so far):

Showcase Portfolio

Create a showcase portfolio page on your blog to highlight your learning in grade 6.

Include:

Your Student Led Conferences goals
A brief reflection on each goal. Did you meet your goal? Why or why not? Did it help you this year?
Special pieces of work that you would like to highlight
A visual or a link for each piece of work you are highlighting – even if you don’t have a link or a visual for a piece, you should still include it. You can take a picture of it anytime before school ends and then include it in your portfolio later
A brief description of why this piece of work is special

Types of work that you might like to include:

things you’re proud of
things you did well on
things you found interesting
things you thought were fun
things you learned a lot from

Steps to complete your Showcase Portfolio

Create a new page on your blog
Call your page Showcase or Showcase Portfolio or Portfolio
Add a title: Grade 6 (next year we’ll add a new section for grade 7, and so on)
Type your goals from your SLC document
Type your reflections for each goal
Determine which pieces of work you want to highlight – these may be the same pieces from SLC (but it’s ok if they’re not)
Find examples for each piece of work you’re highlighting – could be a blog link, could be a picture or a video & add them to your page
Type a description for each piece, think about:
1. Why did you include this piece
2. What did you learn from this piece/experience
3. What are your next steps with this piece of work/experience

And here are a few (still in progress) samples from my wonderful sixth graders (please leave them a comment, they would love it!):

Once they completed their pages, I e-mailed their parents to encourage them to have a conversation with their children about their learning at home. Of course, this is just the beginning, and a very simple version at that. I’m hoping that we can continue developing this process so that next year all middle school students produce a showcase portfolio that can be built upon year after year.

What do you think? Do your students use blogs as eportfolios? What do you like/dislike about the process?

Image Credits

the end or the beginning on Flickr by Darwin Bell
Trying to Extinguish the Sun! on Flickr by radiant guy

Student Blogging Guidelines

See You in Shanghai!

Kim Cofino — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 09:29:24 +0000

I just booked my flight to Shanghai for the Learning 2.011 conference Sept 8 – 10th!

Once again, I am super excited to be a cohort leader at this innovative and engaging conference. Over the last 4 years, I’ve been to all three of the Learning 2.0 events, each one better than the last. In general, I’m not too big of a conference fan. Lots of sitting around listening to people talk about what we should be doing, but not a lot of actually doing what we’re talking about. Learning 2.0 is different, and that’s what I love about it.

This conference is so fantastic, thanks to the newly developed cohort format (which I love) and the consistently amazing group of presenters they manage to bring together every year, that I want to make sure I’m not the only one from YIS who gets to attend. All too often it’s just the technology leaders at a school that attend technology conferences. And, as much as I love going (thank you Learning 2.0 team for inviting me again!), I want to make sure that it’s not only the technology department attending this year. Here’s why:

Making Connections

As much as I love Japan (and I do!) we are very isolated here. Although there are many, many international schools in Tokyo (and around Japan), for the most part, they are still fairly traditional. And because life here is so easy and wonderful, people don’t really tend to look outwards for inspiration or new ideas. Being so physically isolated can also mean that it’s difficult to bring in new and fresh ideas into the school community.

Thanks to my amazing PLN, I continue to feel very well connected and I would love for more of our YIS teachers to experience that same kind of ongoing, relevant and exciting learning environment. Even though it’s possible to build a PLN from a distance, it’s so much more fun to meet in real-life, and certainly so much more eye-opening to see and hear about what other schools are doing in a face-to-face conversation.

Shared Inspiration

The highlight of every conference is the people. And the Learning 2.0 team does an exceptional job of bringing together some pretty brilliant minds every year. The beginning of the year is the perfect time for our YIS teachers to be inspired by the most innovative educational leaders from Asia and around the world. Experiencing new ideas and new ways of thinking as team (and not just one or two individuals) will give us a common understanding and clear reference-point to bring new ideas back to our school environment.

Combined Impact

Ideally, sending one teacher from each department will help spread the learning from the conference much farther and deeper than I can do on my own. Plus, we all know how much more powerful an idea is when it comes from another teacher in your subject area or grade level. This will also help us build teacher-leaders in many different areas of the school. Of course, we can all work together to help build a common understanding of what types of learning we would like to see in our school. Our team can become the technology PD leaders for the school, collaborating and sharing our learning throughout the entire year.

So, despite the amazing amount of tech-related PD we already have in the works for YIS next year, I’ve put together a short proposal to send a team to Learning 2.0, thanks to Jabiz’ inspiration a few weeks ago.

Learning 2.011 Teacher Team Proposal

Goal: Send a team of teachers to the conference, with at least a portion paid by YIS.

Team Members: teachers who have shown an interest in pushing their understanding of how technology can enhance learning.

Expectations: All team members will:

monitor, document and reflect on their learning as a group.
use Twitter hashtags to document conference learning.
reflect on their daily learning and thoughts using a blog.
use Google Docs to share resources, links, and ideas for others teachers back at school.
collaboratively bookmark using Diigo to share resources with the team and teachers back at school
share their learning with their departments and other teachers upon return by:
- leading a PD session on what they learned (e.g. SpeedGeeking).
- become a point-person for technology within their department.
- host a labsite session for their department (or mixed departments) based on what they’ve learned.

Final Thoughts

What I really like about this simple proposal is that it’s not just getting the school to send a few lucky teachers to a great event. It’s all about bringing back the energy and enthusiasm from that shared experience to the rest of our colleagues. If we plan this right, we can:

extend the learning from one weekend in September throughout the year,
highlight a different teacher and subject-area at a number of practical internal professional development sessions,
help build a collaborative peer-mentoring process for so many of our teachers that will be new to a 1:1 learning environment (as we begin our Connected Learning Community in August in grades 6-12),
continue several successful professional development delivery models to meet different learning needs, and
develop teacher leaders for technology throughout the school.

I think it could be really powerful for the whole school. And I’m pretty excited.

What do you think? Is it useful to bring a whole team of teachers to a conference? Is it worth attending conferences at all any more? Have I missed any other advantages? Who are you bringing to Learning 2.011?

Image Credits:

ready to enjoy the weekend on Flickr by jmtimages
Queen Cup on Flickr by Max xx