High+School+Morning+Sessions

=Wed., Dec. 21, 2011=

Technology Integration
21 Things for the 21st Century Educator - General website that is FANTASTIC to use for the background all educators should have to keep up with learning in the 21st century.

//**Make an appointment with Carol Roth to review any specific interests you have that we do not have a chance to discuss this morning.**//

Flexible Grouping Techniques
//Making use of technology to assist you in creating groups to help students stay engaged and offering them collaborative opportunities is a must in education today. Flexible grouping is also one of the easiest ways to differentiate in your classroom to accommodate differing reading or math levels, interests, learning styles, or skill sets.//

Some Tools to Help You:

 * On-line learning styles inventory - this free website allows students to complete the inventory, analyze their results, learn what the results mean, save the profile to use later, and share the results with a teacher.
 * Interest Surveys - use Google Forms (such as the one you took prior to this meeting) or Survey Monkey (see sample HERE) to create a survey for students to complete so you can group them by interests for reading articles or choosing topics &/or products for projects.

media type="youtube" key="6ih0d-pEI_s" height="301" width="536" align="right"

 * Edmodo - great communication website with lots of built in tools; also has a parent portal
 * Moodle - email Carol Roth to have this set up for you if you are interested - to the right is a YouTube Tutorial on Moodle 2.0 that can help you navigate the new Moodle upgrade

For Everyone:

 * Teacher Website - on School Center - standard but can be very effective (great example HERE)
 * Class Website - suggest trying Google Sites or Weebly for ease of use and nice options
 * Class Wiki - Wikispaces and PBWiki are very popular in promoting collaborative work
 * My Big Campus - BRAND new for our district - has functions of Edmodo/Facebook, gives teachers capability to open student access to relevant video clips and websites the filter may block, and allows teachers and students to communicate to the outside world through a blog. (see image below)

=Wed., Sept. 21, 2011=

[[image:fire.png width="288" height="288" align="right"]]Planning
//**How will you turn up the HEAT in your lessons?**// >>
 * Check out the rubric: [[file:HEAT_and_DABP_Rubric.pdf]]
 * Choose one lesson to analyze and rate the level for each HEAT component.
 * Can you think of a way to bump up the HEAT level by one in each area?
 * Here is a helpful planning document for higher-order thinking
 * [[file:Bloom's planning sheet.doc]]
 * A few ideas for each HEAT component:
 * Higher-order thinking
 * Instead of just having students watch a video in class have them backchannel using Today's Meet.
 * If students are going to be completing a project or paper have them brainstorm on a Google Drawing so they can edit it at home if they think of new ideas or even work with a partner.
 * [[image:Google_Drawing_Sample.png width="328" height="246"]]
 * Engaged learning
 * Allow students to work together on a Google Document to collaborate on a chosen problem. These students may not even be in the same class or course but they are on the same problem from different angles. (e.g., Art sculptures around building and English class writing one act plays of the story behind the sculpture.)
 * Survey students (Google Forms or Survey Monkey works great for this) on their interests to group them with students of similar interests and have them choose their project related to the main topic.
 * Authenticity
 * Have students question people outside of school on viewpoints. Data can be entered in a Google Form and results shared with everyone in class and can be graphed easily.
 * Connect with someone, local or not, that has experience in a topic in your subject area to speak, Skype, comment on blogs, or give project feedback. (Don't be afraid to ask. The worst that can happen? They say, "no thank you.")
 * Technology Use
 * Purposeful use of technology woven in to your lessons. The goal is that it should be used to do things that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise.
 * Studying a topic linked to South America? Connect with someone that lives in South America and set up a Skype session with your classes.
 * Have students decide which technology tool is the best for a task and have them pitch to you why it is a good choice.
 * Digital-age best practices
 * Have students submit questions they have about a topic of study and use them to steer the direction of study.
 * Anchor students to the learning in a unit by setting up an Edmodo group for students to discuss class prompts together, answer surveys, reflect on readings, post work for others to learn from, etc. either in or outside of class.