21st C Social Studies at edcampOCSS – Portland Ore

edcampOCSS logo

ocss seal-200

Calling all educators interested in Social Studies, History, Geography, Government, and Economics who live in the NW. Plus Humanities, Librarians, Technology and Administrators. K-12 plus college level. Here’s a great reason to head to Portland and connect with other educators!

I’ve been involved with Portland’s successful edcampPDX and I’m pleased to be a co-chair of this social studies themed edcampOCSS sponsored by The Oregon Council for the Social Studies.

Join us in Portland Oregon on May 17, 2014.
(8:30 AM – 2:15 PM,  then we’ll go somewhere for beers)

Valley Catholic Middle School,
4420 SW St. Mary’s Drive,
Beaverton, OR 97007 Map
We’ll begin with coffee in the middle school cafeteria. Look for signs to guide you.
The campus can be accessed from Murray Blvd or Farmington. There are signs on campus that indicate the buildings. The main parking lot is on the east side of the building.

This is a free event.
Sign up to attend here
Suggest sessions here

Door prizes from Simple K12 include 5 FREE 1-year, full access individual memberships to SimpleK12’s Teacher Learning Community (each valued at $357). Plus every attendee gets a free copy SimpleK12’s most popular premium eBook resources, “57 Inspirational Quotes.”

Simple K12 Logo

Door prizes from Herff Jones include a one year classroom license to StrataLogica and classroom sets of atlases.

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Big thank you to ORVSD for sponsoring a free lunch for the first 75 who sign up.

ORVSD

Here’s some of sessions that have already been suggested. More 

  • Teaching with Documents (4-16)
  • Literacy strategies in social studies (3-8)
  • Getting to Know iBooks Author (all grades)
  • Teaching US History from OR perspective (4-12)
  • Discussion techniques for students  (all grades)
  • Teaching with Social Media (6-12)
  • Intro to Project Based Learning in the k-5 classroom (K-5)
  • Population Connections/Geography/Sustainability in a World of 7 Billion (6-12)
  • Using Prior Historical Knowledge to progressively spiral the disciplinary literacy skills necessary to prepare students for college and/or career. (5-12)
  • Using Google tools (Earth, Docs, Sheets, etc…) to study geography and explore history in different places. (6-212)
  • Why’d She Do It? Hacking Motivation (K-12)

On the Twitters? Use hashtag #edcampOCSS. Follow @ocss14

On the Facebook Follow Oregon Council for the Social Studies | Follow event edcampOCSS

What are the goals of edcampOCSS?

  • Networking: Connect educators in the Portland / Oregon / SW Washington area
  • Instructional Practices: Learn new curriculum ideas, best practices, and/or tech integration ideas from other educators
  • Personalized: You customize your own PD by suggesting, facilitating and attending sessions about topics that interest you!

Join PDX Educators at edcampPDX April 12

edcampPDX-april-14

Calling all teachers, instructional technologists, IT directors, principals, admins and teacher librarians who live in the NW:  edcampPDX – Saturday, April 12, 2014 More info
Meriwether Lewis Elementary School | 4401 SE Evergreen, Portland, OR 97206 | Map

What is edcampPDX?
An edcamp is a unconference-style day of professional development organized and given by the local participants. Sign up to attend here!

What should I bring?
Bring a friend and a device (either a laptop or mobile device) with wireless internet access to view the website, see the sessions, take notes and view online resources discussed throughout the day.

Kids are welcome at EdCampPDX! Please bring them and their perspective. Make sure to add them to the list so they’ll get a lunch. Don’t worry, we’ll put them to work!

Do you tweet?
Yes! Twitter updates about #edcampPDX. Follow @EdCampPDX on Twitter.

What does it cost?
The day is FREE!!!

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What are the goals of edcampPDX?

  • Networking: Connect educators in the Portland / Oregon area
  • Instructional Practices: Learn new curriculum ideas, best practices,
  • and/or tech integration ideas from other educators
  • Personalized: You customize your own PD by suggesting, facilitating and attending sessions about topics that interest you!

edcamppdx-app

Student Consultants Design Museum Curriculum and Mobile App

Portrait of Seki Hiromura-Ace's mother and one of the Hiromura boys

If you follow my blog, you’re well aware of my advocacy for project-based learning. So when I was asked to teach a social studies methods class at the University of Portland, I naturally looked for a way to integrate a community-based project that would give my graduate and undergraduate pre-service teachers experience in PBL, the chance to work along side professional historians and an opportunity to make a difference in the community. For more on our course approach, see our class blog.

I live in downtown Portland on the edge of what is known as Old Town / Chinatown. Its a very diverse and historic neighborhood and once the center of a thriving Nihonmachi or “Japantown.” It’s now the home of the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, a small museum dedicated to “Sharing and preserving Japanese-American history and culture in Portland’s Old Town neighborhood, where Japantown once thrived.”

I approached the museum with a simple question – “What could you do with a dozen unpaid curriculum consultants?”

While planning my course, I approached the museum with a simple question – “What could you do with a dozen unpaid curriculum consultants?” And so our partnership began – my pre-service history teachers working with professionals at the museum to develop educational material to support their collection. I wanted my student so experience project-based learning from the perspective of the learner in the hopes that they would someday incorporate that approach into their teaching. I also wanted them to recognize that effective teachers are entrepreneurs, actively fostering external partnerships to support learning in their classrooms.

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After a number of meetings we decided on three projects – an online lesson using curated videos detailing Japanese incarceration, a series of lessons to support an artifact-filled Museum in a Suitcase for circulation to Portland area schools and a iPhone app “Walking Tour of Japantown PDX.” All three projects would extend the reach of the museum and celebrate a once vibrant community that had fallen victim to wartime hysteria.

The app was going to take some technical assistance, so I reached out the Portland’s app community and was able to partner with GammaPoint LLC, PDX-based mobile app developer. We are worked with them to develop Japantown PDX, a native iPhone app walking tour of the historic Japantown in Portland. It features geo-fenced text, photos, audio and tools for sharing user reaction to the content via social media. We are also working with GammaPoint to make this project replicable in the k-20 space.

gallery-1912 Portrait

More on PDX Japantown: During the 1890s Portland was a hub from which Japanese laborers were sent to work in the railroads, canneries, lumber companies and farms throughout the Pacific Northwest. By the 1920s, a steady stream of Japanese “picture brides” had transformed a rough and tumble twelve-block section north of W Burnside between 2nd and 6th Ave into a more respectable Nihonmachi with over 100 Japanese managed businesses and professional office. Portland’s Japantown thrived until the WWII when Issei and Nisei were rounded up by federal officials and incarnated in inland camps. Portland’s Japantown was decimated. After the war a few returned to the old neighborhood, but many took up new residence in Portland’s postwar single family housing boom. The neighborhood had long been home to African-Americans and various immigrant groups. As Chinese-Americans began to predominate in the neighborhood, it gradually became known as Chinatown. Today, even most Portlanders are unaware of it’s heritage as Japantown.

Learn, Share and Win an Apple TV at edcampPDX

edcamppdxCalling all educators! Here’s your excuse to come to Portland Ore and have a great time while expanding your PLN. I’ll be there with a very talented group of Pacific NorthWest educators who are interested in sharing ideas for creating engaging classrooms. You’ll have a good time and leave with loads of great ideas for the classroom. 

Creative educators + free lunch + shot at an Apple TV + hanging out in Portland = best PD around

Join us for EdCampPDX, the FREE, unconference-style, collaborative, educator-driven, customized professional development day. Enjoy a day of sharing ideas, networking, and collaborating with your peers – teachers, administrators, pre-service teachers and anyone interested in teaching and learning.
Lunch is provided by an awesome sponsor. And yes, there are door prizes, including an Apple TV. 

Wednesday, August 7, 2013
9:00 to 4:00
at LaSalle Catholic College Prep
11999 SE Fuller Rd.
Portland, OR 97222 MAP

Photos from previous edcampPDX
Follow Twitter updates at #edcampPDX
Join the edcampPDX Google Group to network and keep up with our news and notes.

Here’s a few of the sessions we’ve got planned so far – but it’s an edcamp, so who know what else we’ll add when we get there?

  • Using apps such as Minecraft (coming soon to an ORVSD server near you!)
  • The new Google Maps, and Notablity in the classroom
  • Getting started with iBooks Author – bring your iPad and I’ll give you a copy of Recruiting Rosie – my latest iBook
  • Using iPads and Chromebooks with Vernier probeware
  • How to make a living in education outside the classroom
  • Thinking differently about education via SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition)
  • PBL lesson planning hack-a-thon
  • Creating a professional learning plan incorporating SAMR and CRCD frameworks
  • Speed-Geeking App share
  • What are the best tools to create infographics in the classroom? How do you incorporate them into the classroom?
  • How do we use high tech and no-tech strategies to keep our students engaged and self-selecting reading material? Discussion open to all grade levels.
  • EdmodoCon hookup
  • Learn how to use Celly
  • Beginning with Tech in Your Classroom
  • Your PLN is Yours!
  • The STEM Lab of the Future
  • Scoot and Doodle collaboration tool

Invite your friends, colleagues, and administrators by simply forwarding this email!
Sign up here and while you’re there, please add your session ideas on the session page.

Invite your friends, colleagues, and administrators! Hope to see you there!

Cool boots from November’s edcampPDX. But it’s summer, I’ll bet we’ll all be in flip-flops.

Cool boot optional

Common Core Training: Five Essentials

plainfield workshop

Teachers are too savvy to fall for an empty promise that something is “common-core-aligned.”

I just returned from a full-day workshop for middle school social studies teachers at Plainfield CCSD 202 (IL). It was entitled “Think Like a Historian: Literacy and the Common Core.” 

Teachers everywhere are concerned about the impact of Common Core. But they won’t benefit from lecture-style PD that itemizes specific strands and standards of Common Core. Promoting curricular “checklists” doesn’t build capacity, it fosters either resistance or mindless compliance. Don’t talk about “close reading” – do it!

As Charlotte Danielson has written: “I think the common core rests on a view of teaching as complex decision making, as opposed to something more routine or drill-based. … So I see the common core as a fertile and rich opportunity for really important professional learning by teachers, because — I don’t know now how to say this nicely — well, not all teachers have been prepared to teach in this way. I see that as one of the enormous challenges facing the common core rollout.

Teachers need a demonstration what Common Core teaching actually looks like, how the essential elements of Common Core connect to what they are already doing and why students will need to master these skills to be successful lifelong learners.

Here’s five PD essentials to support teachers in transitioning to close reading and the Common Core followed by specific comments from the Plainfield teacher evaluations.

1. Make it real. Teachers are too savvy to fall for an empty promise that something is “common-core-aligned.” And remember you lose credibility if you “paper over” Common Core’s controversies.

  • Thanks for the opportunity to freely express our opinions.
  • It’s great to be able to discuss the frustration and then move forward to what’s best for kids.
  • I appreciate that you never “dodged” a tough question.

2. Start from where teachers are. Reinforce their existing practice and offer a feasible framework for Common Core “make-overs” to their current lessons.

  • I now think it’s possible to successfully teach close reading. The responsibility is mine to teach how to do so.
  • I feel affirmed. It was nice to hear that how I run my classroom is right on track with today’s workshop.
  • My confidence has increased. I have a real chance of making these things work.
  • Loved the close reading using images. I’ve done this for years and never had a name for it.
  • I have a lot of these pieces already in place, but now I know how to more neatly tie them together.

3. Teachers don’t want abstract theory. They want ideas they can use in the classroom. Model the strategies, don’t just talk about them.

  • Each piece of information was attached to examples, how-tos, and evidence of its value. I was shown what works, why it works, and how to use it in my classroom.
  • It’s so helpful to participate in the activities just as our student should.
  • “Practice what you preach.” We were part of our learning just as we expect students to be.
  • Your presentation hits all learning styles.
  • I’m stealing a lot of these activities.

4. Common Core relies on relinquishing responsibility for learning to the student. Teachers have to be encouraged to “be less helpful” as they shift to student-centered, constructivist approaches.

  • I need to remember that when it comes to student responses – there doesn’t need to be a “right answer.”
  • A great reminder / inspiration to be student centered and remember that kids will need to be invested and own their learning.
  • Summarize and comparing – students need to share what’s actually important to them – powerful!
  • I will focus more on peer and student reflection and revision.
  • I like the idea of students evaluating their own progress and realize that it’s an easy thing to do if we make the effort.

5. The critical competencies of Common Core asks students to operate at higher levels thinking. They’ll need to analyze, evaluate, share and debate their ideas with others. Those activities should form the basis of the training.

  • I now understand more about Bloom’s Taxonomy than I did in college.
  • Getting students to think at higher levels is not as difficult as I thought it was.
  • I need to stop starting every lesson at the low end of Blooms. Want to start some at the top.