Category: Presentations

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Managing Project Based Learning (PBL) and Student Portfolios

I’m an advocate of project based learning (PBL) because students grow when they are actively involved in tasks that give them choices in product, process and evaluation. Throughout my teaching career, I looked for ways to shift responsibility for learning to the the student by designing academic experiences that provoked authentic student reflection. Unfortunately, I often felt like the “system” conspired to make that instructional shift very difficult – and the “forced march to AYP” didn’t make that transition any easier!
 
Despite the challenges, there are growing numbers of teachers and administrators who want to move to PBL – an approach that values student creativity over test prep. Yet many are still hampered by a system tied to the standard report card /gradebook. After all, even the most innovative educator can get turned off when paperwork gets in the way of teaching and learning. 
ProjectFoundry Recently I heard about ProjectFoundry, a Milwaukee-based team of educational entrepreneurs who are tackling the task of bringing real-world feasibility to managing PBL. I was new to ProjectFoundry, so I  spent some time with their operations manager, Shane Krukowski touring their program via GoToMeeting. Shane and the ProjectFoundry team are veteran teachers with extensive experience in urban schools. It was clear to me that they have a genuine appreciation for the institutional barriers that often hold back student-centered innovations. 
I was pleased to see how their ProjectFoundry system simplified the PBL process – from proposal, through project workflow, to product showcasing, and evaluation. ProjectFoundry fostered student engagement with peer evaluation and feedback. All the work products easily flowed into a student portfolio with a variety of formats to export and share with peers and parents.  And the folks at central office will be pleased that the entire process can be quickly aligned with state and district standards.
ProjectFoundry has asked me to be the keynote speaker at a summer conference devoted to managing project based leaning and student portfolios. I look forward to the chance to meet educators from around the country who are having success with ProjectFoundry and those that are looking for ways to more easily manage their PBL process. 

ProjectFoundry Summer Conference: July 21-22, 2009
Location: The Tagos Leadership Academy in Janesville, WI. 
Audience: ProjectFoundry users and those interested in PBL management
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How To Use Twitter to Virtually Network at the ASCD Conference 2009

I couldn't attend this year's ASCD conference currently going on in Orlando. That's a shame, since conferences are such a great place to meet new people and share ideas. So I thought I use Twitter to see if I can virtually meet folks and share thinking.  

First here's my elevator speech introduction – conference attendees pretend we just met over coffee…

Great to meet you… My name's Peter Pappas, from Rochester NY. I taught high school social studies for over 25 year, became a K-12 coordinator and then finished the last 5 years of my career as a assistant superintendent for instruction. Since then, I've been able to devote myself, full time, to expanding my role as a staff developer and consultant.

I've had the chance to work with districts across the country with a focus on literacy, technology, document-based instruction and student engagement. Staff development should model what we want to see in the classroom, so I bring an audience response system and we actually use the techniques I'm promoting!

Follow me on Twitter – hope you have a great conference!

Oh .. and … have you heard of any good sushi restaurants nearby? …..

Note: As of 4/26/09 the TwitterCloudExplorer seems to have disappeared.  Here's a screen shot of what it looked like during the ASCD conference. Notice my Twitter name edteck was the 4th most Twittered word when I took the screen shot.

Twitter-cloud


Technical Specs

1. Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.  I sought out the relevant hashtags people are using for the ASCD conference. Note: It seems this year both #ASCD and #ASCD09 are being used. For more on hashtags 
2. I used a Twitter Search to look for people using the #ASCD OR #ASCD09 hashtags. Search results here.

3. Then I sent out Tweets to people using either hashtag with a link back to this post. Hopefully their replies will follow.
4. I'm a big fan of quantitative display of information, so I used one the many new Twitter visualization tools – Twitter Cloud Explorer to generate this embedded query. Note: As of 4/26/09 the TwitterCloudExplorer seems to have disappeared.  There are many new Twitter visualizations coming along every day.

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TeachME 2009 International Education Conference ~ Dubai, UAE

Teachme

I'm pleased to have been invited to present at the TeachME 2009 Conference in Dubai (January 14-15, 2009). TeachME 09 has registered delegates from: Australia, Egypt, Gambia, Germany, Iran, Jordan, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Liberia, Pakistan, Qatar, Sultanate of Oman, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and USA.

I will give two talks and offer three workshops. You can download pdf version of the handouts. I've removed the images and video to keep file size down.

Talks

Workshops

The conference has been organized by Rearden Educational – the only educational company of its kind in the Arab world, serving the Levant and GCC countries. Organized under the banner of Excellence in Education, the conference mission is:

Confronted with modern teaching techniques, educators have some thorny issues to sort through and a portfolio of skills to adopt in their quest to ensure lifelong learning. Today’s teachers must motivate students to read, seek knowledge, initiate activities that catalyze their curiosity, engage them in debates, innovate when resources are scarce, stimulate their senses and drive to explore, make it rewarding for them to investigate, captivate their interest in networking and get them to cooperate together towards a common and worthwhile purpose. Experts at the TeachME 2009 Conference will gear their efforts towards focusing their workshops around these themes adding inspiration to education in an innovative approach.


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Creating Presentation Handouts in Apple Keynote

I’m a recovering PowerPoint user that’s been using Apple Keynote for my presentations for about a year. I find it much friendlier to graphics and media. It took me a while to figure out how to create B/W six slide / page handouts that I could easily PDF to clients. Thought I’d pass it along. If you have any more suggestions, let me know!
PS. I use the Mac native pdf creation tools (too cheap to buy Adobe Acrobat for my Mac). For this illustration I’m working with a 108 slide Keynote presentation with lots of graphics.
Step 1: I open my Keynote handout presentation. I select File/ Print. Keynote defaults to Keynote in drop down box – I select “Layout.”
 Picture 1
Step 2: In the “Pages Per Sheet” box, I choose 6. Note: This “Pages per Sheet” choice doesn’t appear on the default “Keynote” print screen.
Picture 2
Step 3: I click “PDF” button in lower left and chose “Save as PDF” This gives me a color pdf – 6 slides per page. In the sample I’m working on, I have now created a 16 MB PDF file.
Picture 3
Now my goal is to convert to gray scale (for the client to photocopy) and to reduce the file size.
Step 4: Open the newly created PDF  handout in Apple Preview. I choose “File/Save As… “
Picture 4
In the “Quartz Filter”  selection box, I choose “Gray Tone.” I save that new gray tone PDF. Nice looking handout, but I have greatly increased the file size. (from 16 to 103 MB). Too big to send to the client!
Picture 5
Step 5: I open the newly created Gray Tone version of the pdf in Preview and do another “Save As…” Just like in step 4. This time in the  “Quartz Filter” selection box, I choose “Reduce File Size.” That creates a new PDF with file size reduced from 103 MB to 5.7 MB (Even smaller than 16 MB color PDF I created in step 3)
Picture 6
Since I am usually sending of lots of handouts to multiple clients. I have another blog devoted to distributing them. That way I can email a link to my “Handout Blog”  and let them deal with downloads at their end.
Hope this helps!
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Teaching American History Grant – The Student as Historian

This week I traveled to Waco TX where I conducted two days of training for an ESC Region 12 "Teaching American History" grant.  I had the chance to work with 5th, 8th and 11th grade teachers on techniques to move the focus of history instruction to document-based instruction. I used resources from my website "Teaching with Documents" and a variety of web 2.0 tools to help teachers see how they can create learning environments that allow students to do the work of the historian. On our second day, teachers used mobile laptops to develop their DBQ's and try out the various web resources.

The response from teachers was very positive. They wrote.

The best part of the workshop is that we had time to practice and digest the information were were using.

A good "kick in the pants" on some big picture ideas.

Made me revisit my own strategies…. Questioning strategies were repeatedly reinforced.

My head is spinning and I am giddy from all the resources and insights.

I need to reevaluate the way I teach. You gave me a lot to think about. 

Got me excited about what I'm going to do next in my classroom.