Tag: Innovation

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A Prezi Guide to an Effective School – The Reflective Student, Teacher and Principal

Reflective School
Reflective School

This week I’m presenting at the “Teaching and Learning Conference” in Amphitheater SD (Tucson AZ). Next week, I will keynote at the “Rigor, Relevance and Relationships Leadership Conference” in Cyprus-Fairbank ISD (Houston TX). 

In addition to workshops on learning strategies and educational technology, I will feature a session on “Teaching, Learning and Leading in a Reflective School.” This workshop is based on my 4-part blog series “A Taxonomy of Reflection: Critical Thinking For Students, Teachers, and Principals.”

To visually introduce my taxonomy, I created the Prezi presentation below. Click on the arrow at the base of the Prezi to navigate. Then click “More” to view full screen or embed.  For a direct link to this Prezi click here.

Enjoy, reflect, and leave your feedback with a comment.

 

The Reflective School by Peter Pappas on Prezi

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Your Mission is Life-long Learning: A Video How-To

Most school mission statements include a reference to “fostering life-long learners.” Nonetheless if you walk through most schools you’ll find an information landscape that seems designed to suppress that goal. Far too many adults telling students what to know – as if that will inspire them to take responsibility for their learning. 

To explore the meaning of life-long learning at your school, I suggest you show this video (and a few of the comments it received) at your next faculty meeting. I’ve included a few questions for your follow-up discussion. 

Background: “help with a bowdrill set” is a YouTube video posted by a young man looking for help in using his bowdrill to start a fire. After detailing his materials and techniques, he states “I know I’m doing it wrong. Please comment down below so you can teach me how to do it.” If you view his YouTube post you’ll see that his video has over 8500 views and fifty people took the time to offer concrete advice. I trust he’s now successfully starting fires.

Guided questions:
1. How would you define teacher and student in this video? What roles / responsibilities do they have?
2. What information / skills / strategies did the young man lack? What did he have?
3. In what ways is the teaching / learning environment of this video similar to / different from your classroom?
4. What does all this suggest about the paths to life-long learning?

 

Tip of the hat to Angela Maiers and Ben Grey. I first saw this video at their 2010 ASCD conference workshop   Link to my Prezi coverage of the conference 


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School Reform? Be Honest and Start from Where You Are (A Free Webinar)

Program-improvement-diagram This Friday, my friends over at TurningTechnologies are sponsoring a free one-hour webinar entitled Impact Every Student: Simple Strategies That Provide Big Improvement (April 30, 2010 | 2:00 pm Eastern)

I was impressed with the frankness of their description "With all the options available to promote school improvement, where should we begin? If we're smart, we'll start by being honest." I'm all for honesty – you can only truly start from where you are.

The webinar promises to focus on how to engage teacher teams in effective assessment, planning and action. It features Mike Schmoker (author and consultant) , Tina Rooks, (K-12 Ed Consultant at Turning Technologies) and from the field – Sharyn C. Gabriel (principal) and Janet Bergh (reading coach) from Ocoee Middle School. Ocoee, FL

It should be valuable for teachers, leaders and all those dedicated to school improvement! Here's the link to the webinar.

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Social Media Engagement for Schools

Educators who are already using Twitter (and other social media) know the power of interaction with your own personal learning network. It’s like a never ending seminar that you can freely visit to learn, share, and reflect. By far, the best professional development going! Likewise, more of our students are using social media to learn and to share their thinking / creativity with an authentic audience of peers.

While many teachers and students have embraced social media, most schools still lag behind, struggling with the question of whether they should formalize social media networks for their students, teachers, and community. 

First step – help school leadership better understand what social media is and how it can be effectively utilized. (Hint: it’s more than Twittering about what you had for lunch.)

My hats off to Hans Mundahl, Director of Experiental Learning and Technology Coordinator at the New Hampton School, who has provided a great video that introduces the potential for social media engagement for schools. He even simplifies it to this tidy equation …

(Engagement + trust) x targeted audience = impact

Which translates into…

(social media + shared authentic conversation) x personal learning network = quick useful resource

 

 

When your done with the video be sure to take a look at the great wiki page resource that his PLN created.

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87 Free Web 2.0 Projects For the K-12 Classroom

Web-2.0-projects Web 2.0 sites become more useful as the number of users grow. Fortunately for teachers, there's loads of free educational 2.0 applications that can be utilized in the classroom to help students research, collaborate and share what they've learned.

Hats off to British educator, Terry Freedman, who has solicited lessons from 94 teachers from around the world and edited them into a free downloadable book Download Amazing Web 2 Projects 2 online version  (2 MB pdf) Hint: If you're not following Terry on Twitter (as I do) here's his Twitter link. The book also includes Twitter links to all the creative contributors to the project.

The book is organized by grade level and has curated links to all the web resources utilized. Each project includes a teacher-friendly "how to" with benefits, challenges, management tips, sample screen shots / links and learning outcomes. Terry's project is a great example of how the internet can be harnessed to share and collaborate. Who knows, the projects might even inspire your students to collaborate with their peers on their own book!

BTW – If you are a big fan of Wordle, you might like to see another international teacher collaboration "Build Literacy Skills with Wordle".