Kelly Mill Middle School Google Geeks

Meet the Google Geeks! The Google Basics students at Kelly Mill Middle have opened a help desk for teachers and students during sixth period. Yesterday, the students held their grand opening. They were so excited! The first request was received through their company email and have designed a great service for our school. 

Congratulations to the Google Geeks for starting their new company!

*Pictures from Kelly Mill Middle Facebook page. 

Technology Spotlight - Rebecca Velasquez

Rebecca Velasquez is a ELA/English 1 Instructor at the Center for Accelerated Preparation. 
Rebecca has been teaching for nine years in smaller learning communities. She loves the 1TWO1 classroom. "It helps students organize their work, and being able to send reminders is a plus."  

According to Teresa Counts-Davis, in Ms. Velasquez's class, the "CAP Scholars use Google docs for peer review and collaboration, along with Google presentations and Prezi. CAP Scholars prefer working with the Chromebooks, than with printed materials. They especially utilize the research that is at their fingertips. CAP Scholars are more confident that the assignments completed meet the academic requirements."

Example of Student work:
Students created a virtual exhibit on the Harlem Renaissance for Black History Month. They used books and internet resources to research prominent artists of the time and created a presentation to showcase their work.

SC Midland Summit Featured Speakers

Check out the exciting line up of Featured Speakers for the SC Midlands Summit. Registration is open now! This is an amazing line up for just $35.00. Participants will receive 14 hours renewal hours for attending both days of the conference. 

Jaime Casap

Jaime Casap is the Senior Education Evangelist at Google, Inc. With more than 15 years of technology experience, he is responsible for working with K12 educational institutions and organizations to bring current and future technological innovations into the education environment. Mr. Casap evangelizes the power of technology and the use of Google tools, such as Google Apps and Chromebooks, to help students build the skills needed to succeed, close the digital divide, and help level the playing field. He has worked with hundreds of school systems and states to build the capability to bring Google tools to millions of teachers and students. Mr. Casap is also a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University, where he teaches classes in organizational behavior, leadership, and innovation. He serves on the Advisory Board of Directors for New Global Citizens and the Arizona STEM Education Program, and is a member of the Digital Education Council. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree from the State University of New York at Brockport and a Master’s from Arizona State University.

Contact Information:
Twitter: @jcasap
Google +: Jaime Casap

Tim Childers

Tim Childers currently serves as an Assistant Principal for Technology Integration at the L&N STEM Academy, a STEM Magnet for Knox County Schools. He serves on the Blog Team for the Discovery Educator Network Leadership Council for Tennessee and was selected as a STAR DEN Guru for Discovery. In 2010 he was selected as one of TechSmith's "20 to Watch" rising educators for his use of video in professional development. He has led workshops for the TN Education Technology Conference, the FL Education Technology Conference, and the International Society for Technology in Education.  In 2012 he was selected as a keynote speaker for the Mid-South Technology Conference hosted by Memphis City Schools.
Twitter: @tchilders
Google+: +Tim Childers

Lodge McCammon  image from blog.discoveryeducation.com

Lodge McCammon

A Specialist in Curriculum and Contemporary Media at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation (www.fi.ncsu.edu). His work in education began in 2003 at Wakefield High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he taught Civics and AP Economics.  He finished a Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in 2008 where his work at The Friday Institute continues to bring innovative practices to students, teachers and schools.  He developed a teaching and professional development process called FIZZ which encourages and models best practices in implementing user-generated video and online publishing in the classroom to enhance standards-based lessons.  He is also a studio composer who writes standards-based songs, with supporting materials, about advanced curriculum for K-12 classrooms. (https://www.fi.ncsu.edu/project/fizz/about)

Daniel Russell, Ph.D.

Daniel Russell is the Űber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness at Google in Mountain View.  Dan developed the Power Searching MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that has been popular with teachers around the country.  He earned his PhD in computer science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence before he realized that magnifying and understanding human intelligence was his real passion.  He enjoys teaching, learning, running and music, preferably all in one day.  He worked at Xerox PARC before it was PARC.com, and was in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple where he wrote the first 100 web pages for www.Apple.com using SimpleText.  He also worked at IBM and briefly at a startup that developed tablet computers before the iPad. 

His keynote focuses on what it means to be literate in the age of Google - at a time when you can search billions of texts in milliseconds.  Although you might think that "literacy" is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding.  Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it - knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, interpret the texts that you find, organize (and use) the information you discover, and understand your metacognition - these are all critical parts of being literate as well.  In his talk Dan reviews what literacy means today and shows how some very surprising and unexpected skills will turn out to be critical in the years ahead.
Contact Information:
Google+: Dan Russell

Tammy Worcester Tang image from tammyworcester.com.

Tammy Worcester Tang

Tammy Worcester Tang began her career in the classroom, teaching nearly every grade from kindergarten through middle school.

Currently, Tammy works for ESSDACK, an educational service center in Kansas, as an Instructional Technology Specialist, providing staff development and training in the area of technology integration.

Tammy is extremely innovative and resourceful and specializes in finding unique and creative ways to use traditional computer tools in the classroom. She enjoys sharing her ideas with teachers throughout the nation, at conferences and in schools, and has a presentation style that can be described as inspiring.

Her website, “Tammy’s Technology Tips for Teachers” (www.tammyworcester.com) is a popular online resource for teachers around the world. Tammy is also the author of nearly a dozen best-selling technology resource books that are published and marketed nationally.

Greg Tang Image from www.gregtang.com

Greg Tang

A famed author and speaker, Greg’s goal is to to develop a more intuitive approach to teaching math, one that combines problem-solving and arithmetic and integrates math with language and art.

Greg has written a series of best-selling children’s books starting with “The Grapes of Math,” and has developed several award-winning math games and apps including Kakooma.

To see more about Greg, go to http://www.gregtang.com or http://gregtangmath.com.

School 1TWO1 Spotlight - Spring Valley High School

*Guest blogger, Rob Herron, Spring Valley High School Assistant Principal tells us a little about how Spring Valley is transitioning to 1TWO1.

Over the last 2 years, Spring Valley High has prepared for the full school 1TWO1 roll out, what are some practices your faculty, staff, and administration have started to help move towards school wide 1TWO1?

Spring Valley has really done a great deal in a relatively short period of time.  We have a new Principal, Dr. Baron Davis, who is really committed to using technology in a variety of ways.  Of course, the major effort underway is training our teachers to use technology in appropriate ways that increase student interest in what they are being taught, thus increasing their level of engagement with the material, and ultimately enhancing learning.  We have a lot of really excellent teachers who didn’t need much coaching or instruction.  And we have some folks who desired a bit training.  We’ve offered a lot of it.  During the second semester, for example, Debbie Easler (Media Specialist) and Jason Paddock (ITS) are offering sessions on different topics every Wednesday.  Teachers can select the sessions that most appeal or apply to them.  The classes are offered every period of the day to make it easy for a teacher to attend.  Debbie and Jason have really gone above and beyond in providing relevant training tailored to meet the needs of our teachers.  

We added a Quick Link on our website that we’re calling “1TWO1 in Practice” where we are showcasing student work that could not be easily produced without the 1TWO1 initiative.  The work we will showcase will be great things are students are doing in their classes, with technology, but not just for technology’s sake.  The work chosen will be at least at the Modification level on the SAMR model.  

Spring Valley is doing lot with technology in other ways as well.  The move to Google has opened a lot of opportunities in terms of the ease with which a school or its teachers can communicate information to students, their parents, or the community.  Google Sites is an example.  We’ve made a big move into Sites as they are relatively easy to set up and afford teachers unprecedented ease in communicating information about their courses.  This year we've required all of our teachers to have a basic Google Site for the courses they teach.  The site must contain their contact information, course syllabus, lesson plans, and a Google Calendar with assignments from their courses.  Parents can subscribe to the calendars and have information about upcoming quizzes, tests, and the like delivered to them.  We did a lot of training at the end of last school year, and over the summer, and in the first week of school, to help the teachers get their sites up and running. It’s been very collaborative.  The decision to require teachers to have a site really helped teachers learn Google Apps, and aside from the improvement in communication with parents, that was the real goal. You can view any of our teacher’s Google Sites from the staff directory on the SVHS website.  If anyone is interested in learning how to create a Google Site they are more than welcome to use some of the resources we created (here or here).

We've also moved to using Google Forms for our administrative walk through observations this year, and that's a big improvement.  Google Forms allows us to create a single database shared among the members of the administrative team.  Having all of the observation data in a single database is really powerful, and much more useful than an electronic file folder of a few hundred individual files (i.e. each walk through for each teacher).  Before we moved our walk through to Google Forms someone would have to have opened and read 500 documents to figure that out. A demo version of our form is available for you to see along with the backend spreadsheet.

Spring Valley has changed how we are communicating all of the wonderful things going on.  We used to send out a static, monthly PDF attachment called Viking Update.  Now we use Blogger.  Parents can follow the Viking Update via email or they can read it online.  It’s been pretty popular.   Here is a promo video we made about Viking Update.  We also Tweet everything that we put out on the blog, and much of it ends up on Facebook as well. The blog has had over 12,000 page views in the past 2 ½ months.  Last week we added a Spring Valley YouTube channel, and we put our daily in-house news program on the channel, and that’s linked to the blog, so we hope that encourages even more people to view the blog.

How has the District Quality Implementation Tool (QIT) helped with this transition?

The QIT has definitively guided some of the dialog that we have had with members of our school-level technology advisory board.  It’s caused us to reflect upon much of what we have done, and to think about what needs to still be done.  It’s helped ensure that we have an adequate number of representative stakeholders involved in the conversation.

How does Spring Valley High communicate what is going on with 1TWO1 with your stakeholders, primarily parents and the community?

Thus far our major method of communicating some of what’s been going on with 1TWO1 at SVHS is via the web.  As I mentioned above, Spring Valley has made a big leap forward this year in how we are using available technologies like Google Sites and Blogger to help inform our parents and public.  We have over a hundred teachers individually telling their stakeholders what is going on in their classes everyday via their websites.  In years past some sites were little more than a place a parent might find a teacher’s phone extension.  So while the web itself is hardly revolutionary at this point, the way we are utilizing it, and the number of people who are utilizing it, has changed monumentally.  

We’ve made a big move to web tools with products like Blogger and Twitter.  Parents can simply subscribe to our feeds and the information comes to them.  We’re trying to make it is easy as possible for them to stay abreast of things going on at Spring Valley High School.

We have had several discussions about the 1TWO1 initiative with our School Improvement Council over the past two school years.  I think those conversations have been really productive in that they allayed some concerns that some parents had.  Change is frequently met with a lot of questions.  The resulting dialogue between school officials, our teachers, and our parents was really good, and parents clearly understood that we were not just going to hand out Chromebooks and leave the students to their own devices.  

We have done a fair amount to help the parents with some of this technology.  We had a “Google Parent Night” as part of Open House where parents could go and sit down with an ITS and learn how, for example, to subscribe to a teacher’s Google Calendar. Once parents see how easy it is they love it. We even made a how-to video for the parents which many of our teachers put on their sites.  

How has professional development/learning played a roll in the 1TWO1 transition?

You could not accomplish the things we have without providing professional development opportunities for the faculty.  Jason Paddock and Debbie Easler, and others, have worked tirelessly for the past two school years providing dozens of sessions on various 1TWO1 topics.  The work they have done has taken a lot of the potential trepidation out of something like moving into a one-to-one computing environment in every classroom.  Though it would have been nice to have a Chromebook for every student from day one, the school truly benefited from the gradual roll out.  It gave us a lot of time to plan, train, reflect, amend our plans, re-train, etc.  It also gave us the opportunity to tap into the power of our faculty.  Those who got the devices in their classrooms first were a great resources in helping train the groups who got them subsequently.  We used a “train-the-trainers” approach in some respects, and that helped a lot.  

One thing we’re doing right now is providing optional, weekly staff development opportunities every period of the day every Wednesday during Semester Two.  We are asking our teachers to select a minimum of four sessions over the course of the semester.  Instead of mandating that teachers attend certain things, we are giving them the flexibility to select topics that appeal and apply to them.

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If you are an administrator and would like us to spotlight your school's 1TWO1 implementation, please contact MaryAnn Sansonetti-Wood

Acrocity: Building the City of the Future with the Knowledge of the Past

*Welcome guest blogger, Danielle Elliott- Smith from Muller Road Middle School. 

Our 6^th grade team has worked on an interdisciplinary unit in which students had to integrate their knowledge of science, social studies, math, and language arts in order to create a futuristic city using the building techniques of the ancient world. Students had to design a building using elements of Greek and Roman architecture and integrating one of the six simple machines that they learned about in science class.  After students created their building using all recycled materials, they had to photograph their projects using their iPads and use an app of their choice to highlight the geometric elements present in their structure.  Students also had to submit a Keynote presentation demonstrating not only their knowledge of the six simple machines but also how those simple machines were used in the ancient world to accomplish great feats of engineering.  In language arts, students are working to create brochure guides to Acrocity, the city built from all of the buildings designed and built by our 6^th grade students at Muller Road Middle School. The sixth grade team --Danielle Elliott-Smith, Terry Atkins, Tina Lewis, and Kristy McIntyre

Student Project Pieces

 

BIG NEWS: Dan Russell Coming to the SC Midlands Summit

The SC Midlands Summit is getting closer and as it does the featured speaker line up is getting better and better. Our latest addition to the list is Dan Russell! If you are wondering who Dan Russell is, have you taken the Power Search with Google online? That's him!

Daniel Russell is the Űber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness at Google in Mountain View.  Dan developed the Power Searching MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) that has been popular with teachers around the country.  He earned his PhD in computer science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence before he realized that magnifying and understanding human intelligence was his real passion.  He enjoys teaching, learning, running and music, preferably all in one day.  He worked at Xerox PARC before it was PARC.com, and was in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple where he wrote the first 100 web pages for www.Apple.com using SimpleText.  He also worked at IBM and briefly at a startup that developed tablet computers before the iPad. 

His keynote focuses on what it means to be literate in the age of Google - at a time when you can search billions of texts in milliseconds.  Although you might think that "literacy" is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding.  Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it - knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, interpret the texts that you find, organize (and use) the information you discover, and understand your metacognition - these are all critical parts of being literate as well.  In his talk Dan reviews what literacy means today and shows how some very surprising and unexpected skills will turn out to be critical in the years ahead.

Check out the other featured speakers at the SC Midlands Summit! Register for the SC Midlands Summit today! This is an amazing deal at $35 for two days of learning! 

SAMR Contest for Teachers at Ridge View High!

There are a few teachers at Ridge View High  ROCKIN' new skins on their Chromebooks. Why, you ask? Teachers were asked to redesign a lesson plan based upon the SAMR learning model and submit the lessons for a chance to win a Chromebook cover. Winners went beyond simply substituting technology for another tool; they modified their lessons to allow for tasks that were inconceivable before technology. The lessons were examples of some of the great teaching and learning Ridge View is seeing this year.

What is SAMR?

SAMR, a model designed to help educators integrate technology into teaching and learning , was developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura.  The model aims to enable teachers to design, develop, and integrate digital learning experiences that utilize technology to transform learning experiences to lead to high levels of  achievement for students.  Summer Technology Institute Blog  

Congratulations 

to Mrs. Carol Kannisto, Mr. Steve Nuzum, and Dr. Gordon Maynes for 

transforming their lessons with technology.

Thank you to Tami Lenker, the Ridge View ITS, for sharing this wonderful idea!