New Vodcast Series for Educator Reflection During NTI

First, we must honor the date of this entry!  Not only is today Star Wars Day, but it is the start of Teacher Appreciation Week.  Has there ever been a school year where all teachers have not easily earned the rank of Jedi Knight?  I can't imagine one.  Thanks to all of the compassionate teachers out there who strive to innovate in these challenging non-traditional instructional (NTI) times...and that includes a nod toward the parents and guardians who are co-teaching these lessons at home.

It was an awareness of our Shelby educators who are innovating during NTI that inspired Lora Shields, our district Staff Developer.   Knowing that some hard-won professional learning was happening out there, she proposed a vodcast that could both capture this moment in time as well as share the learning with others.   As we teamed together to make this happen, we shaped the focus of the vodcast series to be guided by two questions:  what new tool or strategy are you currently learning to use during NTI, and in what ways will that transform your teaching when you return to the brick and mortar of your school buildings in the future?

Thus, the vodcast series "Shelby Speaks: Looking Forward" was launched, sharing our facilitated interviews with the creative educators of our district.  As of today, over half of our recorded episodes have been published (see the playlist on SCPS's YouTube channel), and we have already earned acclaim from other education leaders and even local television news:

Love these! “There’s a difference between a project and PBL...” Well-done, @shelbycountysch team! @loratshields @watsonedtech @DugleSusan @rltmartin @JamesNeihof https://t.co/QeXN3zsBfb

— Jonathan Vander Els (@jvanderels) April 26, 2020

Loving these Shelby Speaks series led by @watsonedtech ... this one is on how PBL & exhibitions are still happening for 8th grade, just digital now! Nice work Casey, LaPorsha, & Sarah!! Awesome creativity and innovation with digital tools. Well done. #KyEdNext https://t.co/AWgmjvCLqx

— Dr. Justin Bathon (@justinbathon) April 28, 2020

Teachers @shelbycountysch share how online learning lessons will transform their classrooms: https://t.co/iKki6dsMKf | @SaraSideryWDRB pic.twitter.com/pEwGw1ne0H

— WDRB News (@WDRBNews) April 24, 2020

In particular, I'd like to highlight three episodes that address a few of my favorite educational topics: project based learning and libraries.

In Episode 3, Martha Layne Collins art teacher Lukas Allison talks about how important cross-content PBL and design thinking is to his lesson planning (9:43):

In Episode 5, West Middle School teachers Casey Robinson, Sarah Buchanan, and LaPorsha Jackson talk about the process of moving PBL exhibitions to an online space (12:26):

Lastly, in Episode 10, Julie Webb (Shelby County High School) and Emily Northcutt (Marnel C. Moorman, our K-8 school) discuss how librarians and libraries play an essential role in NTI (18:20):

Thanks to all of the educators worldwide who are attempting the Herculean task of continuing student learning at home, even when our students face substantial inequities of Internet access, food insecurities, and understandable anxieties about our unprecedented present.

Our First Chromebook Deployment

I remember when Shelby County first hired me, in the summer of 2014.  "By the fall of 2015," the admin shared, "we will deploy devices to every high school student in our district.  And they will take them home."  It excited me and was one of the key elements in my decision to applying for the Technology Integration Coach position.  How could I resist being part of such a monumental change in how we can personalize and deliver learning?  So in a very real sense, all the months, weeks, days of work up to now have always pointed to this key moment of deployment, which was equal parts thrilling and terrifying.  But we studied other districts (particularly Mooresville, NC), planned, talked, and planned some more.  This summer I became the Digital Learning Coordinator, and the planning and talking continued.

And then . . . it finally happened.  We took a breath, and deployed.

For three nights and a Saturday morning (September 22-24, 26), principals, teachers, IT, and district staff manned both high schools.  In a carefully organized path, the students came.  They paid their usage fee, watched a digital citizenship video, got their device, and confirmed they could log in with their GAFE account before they left.  There was design input and hard work by many people to create a smooth delivery system, but special kudos must be given to our COO Eddie Oakley for quarterbacking the rollout to such success.

There were many memorable moments in the deployment.  The truck full of Chromebooks getting a police escort from central office to school.  The lines of students, waiting in a hallway to watch their digital citizenship video.  Piles of Chromebooks on a table, each waiting to come home to a student. The many happy, excited faces.

The Chromebooks arrived at MLCHS today via a police escort. Deployment is next week!!@MLCTitanNation pic.twitter.com/fql8cCr4sE

— Shelby Co Schools Ky (@shelbycountysch) September 17, 2015

Waiting to become digital citizens at SCHS. The anticipation is incredible! pic.twitter.com/B7sagLoPh1

— Shelby Co Schools Ky (@shelbycountysch) September 23, 2015

Chromebooks, Chromebooks, Chromebooks.

A photo posted by Adam Watson (@watsonedtech) on Sep 26, 2015 at 6:26am PDT

Night 2 of the @shelbycountysch Chromebook deployment! First @MLCTitanNation student of the night gets his device. pic.twitter.com/gopJOfcnRo

— Adam Watson (@watsonedtech) September 23, 2015

The main concern, of course, was never the devices.  It was and continues to be: How will teachers transform learning?   How will students own their own learning? A few weeks into post-deployment, John Leeper and I visited our Digital Learning Coaches and stopped by several classrooms at both high schools.  There was exciting work already going on, but what struck me the most was the sense of normalcy.  Both students and teachers worked on Chromebooks as if they had been doing it for two months, not two weeks.  And whether it was collaboratively looking at texts and videos in social studies, or personalizing and self-pacing their learning in a math class, or blending offline and online notetaking while being assessed via Kahoot in science, students were learning.  You could feel it.

Mrs. Hamm's students exploring video, text, and compiling their own resources with Chromebooks. @MLCTitanNation pic.twitter.com/pOgI68Uk89

— Adam Watson (@watsonedtech) October 6, 2015

Mrs. Sterrett has students using Blendspace with their Chromebooks to help self-pace math learning. pic.twitter.com/w2DgpnMxdY

— Adam Watson (@watsonedtech) October 6, 2015

In Mrs. Turner's class, students use colored pencils on foldables & Chromebook Google Slides to learn acids & bases. pic.twitter.com/axhp07VvEO

— Adam Watson (@watsonedtech) October 6, 2015

We will have technical hiccups and instructional growing pains as the school year continues.  Change can sometimes be unsettling or even painful.   But to already see transformation, and to know that there will be day a few years from now that the tech will have lost its novelty and merely becomes the vehicle upon which we make sure all students learn the way they need to, when they need to . . . it does the educational heart good, I tell ya.

In closing, I went to my first GAFE summit last weekend as presenter and attendee.   The opportunities and learning I experienced would be worthy of a full blog entry on its own, but for now I will end this entry with a quote that Ken Shelton shared as part of a keynote address:

Teach students not tech, but to "long for the endless immensity of the sea" of learning. @k_shelton #gafesummit pic.twitter.com/bZEmBlwaBJ

— Adam Watson (@watsonedtech) October 4, 2015

If we want to build a ship full of lifelong learners, then let us be better at enticing them with the endless immensity of possibilities.

TUIT: Adam Hicks, Katrina Boone, Kari Patrick (Shelby County High School)

Today is the last day of school for students in Shelby County!  As the end of my tenth and final embedded school visit with Simpsonville Elementary comes to completion, I feel the inevitable wrapping up of Edtech Elixirs for 2014-2015 fast approaching.

As my last #ShelbyTUITshoutout for this school year, I want to highlight some previous work by three fine teachers at SCHS: Adam Hicks, Katrina Boone, and Kari Patrick.

(Quick plug: Adam is also our county's Teacher of the Year for 2014-2015!)

By reviewing their innovative work, we can also look ahead to what teaching may be like in our high school classrooms next year, as our 1:1 initiative begins.

Mr. Hicks, Ms. Boone and Ms. Patrick worked collaboratively on a new digital way of teaching, creating and revising writing in a blended learning digital environment. A few months ago, they discussed their "flipped writing" work at the 2015 KCTE/LA annual conference.  (Their presentation materials are on Mr. Hicks's website.)

First, as students begin writing their essays, Mr. Hicks has a series of tips pertinent to certain writing skills always accessible via his website.  (Here's an example on using text evidence.)

Next, after major writing assessments, student exemplars are chosen.  This honors excellent work and offers an authentic publishing opportunity.  However, as Mr. Hicks points out, the samples are not always from the same “good writers”; rather, a diversity of student work is showcased, since exemplars concentrate only on certain standards/skills, which exhibit the various strengths of each member of the classroom. Mr. Hicks considers this the most meaningful part of the flipped writing experience.

Lastly, students use digital remediation in a variety of ways: peer review, reflection, and revision.  The students create Google Blogs and Docs to share their thoughts and give commentary on work. (This is a great example to consider while training for GAFE next week!)

• For Mr. Hicks's student directions on how to create a Remediation Blog, click here.
• For examples of student blogs and Docs, scroll to the bottom of this page.

In addition, Ms. Boone and Ms. Patrick’s Hybrid Research Paper utilized a bank of videos, made by several 10th grade SCHS teachers, that gave pointers on certain writing standards and skills.  Students could access and revisit these videos “anytime, anywhere,” and the feedback from students on its impact has been positive.

These three outstanding teachers -- like so many of our #ShelbyTUITshoutout educators -- truly show the power of the digital conversion of learning, and how blended learning can be transformative for our district. May they be a model for the rest of us for how technology can help us aspire to heights we never thought possible.

Some last words for the hardworking teachers, admin, and staff in Shelby County Schools as they say goodbye to their students today: Cherish and celebrate! You have helped make academic growth, you have forged relationships, you have made a crucial difference in other people's lives. Education is never a final product, but always a process of becoming. Before you look forward to the summer ahead, look back and reflect on all your real accomplishments. I am proud and honored to be among you!

SCHS Media Arts Showcase

As our Shelby County winter break begins, I wanted to highlight a special occasion that occurred last Thursday night, and in the process give Jacinta Newsome a #ShelbyTUITshoutout.  Her two Shelby County High School multimedia classes,  along with a few other Shelby County students, presented their multimedia work for the public.  I was flattered and excited to be a judge to help score student presentations, along with some other Shelby County colleagues: Ryan Allan (our district PR person and voice behind its social media), Julie Webb (LMS of SCHS), and Lee Louden (our network guru).  Kathie Wrightson, a SCHS teacher who got her own shoutout recently, also helped Jacinta in orchestrating the showcase.

Here would be a good point to give a hurrah to Matt Simons.  Resulting from a request from Jacinta for help, I reached out through a Kentucky tech leader listserv looking for tips and assistance on running a digital showcase.  Matt contacted me and generously offered his workplace facility Creative-Image Technologies as a host location for the showcase.  (C-IT is responsible for installing much of Shelby County's intelligent classroom edtech, as well as offering training sessions to our district personnel, as I wrote about in a previous post.)   It is a beautiful and modern environment to highlight student work, and we were very fortunate for the opportunity.

Each judge met with about ten students, who presented their work one at a time in a different room in C-IT. When they finished, judges and the audience were encouraged to ask questions; each judge was to assess the product and presentation using a rubric provided by Jacinta.  Her instructions were clear: hold the students and their work to a high standard, so the feedback would help them grow.

And the work was impressive.  Students presented everything from video games to digital magazines to music (in appropriately designed CD cases) to short films.  Here are some pictures of the evening taken by Gerald Tegarden, a Yearbook staff member at SCHS.

A screenshot of a video game created by Jaime Rosales (junior, SCHS).

Brenna Gargan (senior, SCHS) presents her digital literary magazine.

Morgan Allen (senior, SCHS; pictured on screen) filmed a documentary about "true beauty."

A certain judge/blog writer looks at a logo from Barby Womack (sophomore, SCHS). Her project was a film about love, cleverly interviewing and editing together the responses of four couples.

Of the work I judged, one of my favorites was a short film by Cole Ivey.  Not only did he compose the music, but Cole shot and edited the video.

Congratulations to all the students who presented work, demonstrating the passion, ambition, leadership, and creativity of Shelby County youth. Thanks again to Matt Simons and C-IT. And a tip of the hat to Jacinta Newsome for providing her students with an authentic learning experience!

Goodbye Rockets, Hello Missiles, Happy Thanksgiving

Another three weeks have rocketed past, and another embedded tour ends.  (Ha!  See what I did there?)  Thanks to all of Shelby County High School, from Mr. Oakley on down, for making me feel at home.  Special thanks to Julie Webb, who was kind enough to open up her library's Kentucky Room to a Cardinal fan such as myself (*cough* 8-3 and coming your way *cough*).

East will be my first embedded Shelby middle school, and I'm looking forward to the experience and meeting the staff.

I am not disciplined enough to stop tweeting for the next six days, but I will likely not blog until after the first of December, my first day at EMS.  Until then, have a safe, happy, and wonderful Thanksgiving long weekend!

TUIT: Kathie Wrightson, SCHS

Kathie Wrightson, an English teacher at Shelby County High School, would have several reasons to deserve a #ShelbyTUITshoutout. She's an eager integrator of tech, starting with the Blackboard LMS she uses with her dual-credit classes.  However, this particular shoutout is because of an app Ms. Wrightson brought to my attention for the first time: Magisto.

Magisto is a free app for Android, iOS and Amazon devices.  (Assuming you have already shot the photos and videos and put them on your hard drive, you could also do it from your desktop, which even allows you to directly connect to your Google Drive; a Windows PC app is coming soon.)  You can either take photos and videos within the mobile app or access media already on the device.  Choose a theme and some royalty-free music (or your own), OR you can choose "Clean" to continue without template effects and use your original audio.  Once you OK it, Magisto takes a few minutes to magically edit it together.  You can preview the "draft" and make final tweaks.  Once you are happy, the video is uploaded to the Magisto website.  You or others can comment on the videos, and share them across social media in various ways.  Videos can also be organized in public or private albums.  You can also make a "group" album open to other members to add their own videos; I can see this handy in a classroom setting.  I have to say, the final product is very professional looking, and the app is extremely easy and fun to use. Here's a sample video I made of SCHS, as well as a link to my public Shelby County album.

As I said, the app is free, but there are some limitations; for example, you are limited to a certain number of media clips, a fixed number of downloads, and the final video cannot be longer than 15 minutes.   If you are willing to spend $4.99 a month for Premium, you can use more multimedia, make longer videos, and get unlimited downloads.  For $9.99 a month at the Pro level, you can get all of what Premium offers plus HD quality videos.

Back to Ms. Wrightson!  Magisto started with leadership from students: they were the ones who brought it to Kathie's attention.  Her English 101 classes were challenged to come up with a social science experiment that involved a cause/effect relationship that applies to real life.  One pair of students came up with a "Free Hugs" theory: a student who is more well-dressed will get more hugs from strangers than a more casually dressed student.  They went to a mall and captured the experience with Magisto.

You can see how Magisto could be used as an engaging and high-order summation and synthesis of learning: documentary of an experiment in a science lab, the working out of a math problem on a whiteboard, historic photos of a world-changing event, a "movie trailer" of a book.

Thanks to Kathie for letting me know about Magisto!

TUIT: Christina Mishio, SCHS

Christina Mishio has taught for three years as a social studies high school teacher.  She admits she's not afraid to take an edtech plunge, even if it's a bit of a scary tightrope walk.  As part of her Criminal Justice class, students have always done an annual group project involving taking notes and analyzing evidence of crime scenes. (In the past, this may have only consisted of finding packets in various places in the school with pertinent information inside.)  However, especially with the help of technology, she wanted to take it to the next level.  So Ms. Mishio reached out to me.  How could she integrate technology and do the project paperless?  If she created actual crime scenes (with police tape, "blood," footprints, etc.) how could students take, annotate, and share pictures?

Enter Evernote and Skitch, two great partners in crime.  (Heh.  Sorry, I can never resist a bad pun.) Both of these edtech tools are high on the list of my all-time faves.  Before we get to the plan I created for her class, a quick intro to each tool is in order.

Evernote has completely transformed my personal and professional life; it is absolutely my favorite organizational, planning, and archiving tool.  You can create Notes arranged in Notebooks, which are saved in the cloud and therefore accessible in real-time syncing across a multiplicity of devices, with desktop programs, smartphone/tablet apps, and even within a web browser.  Notes can consist of text, pictures, audio, and attachments like PDFs.   Notes and Notebooks can also be shared with others, which will be important later.   While Evernote is free, for $5 a month or $45 a year, a Premium account gives you several upgrades including going from a 100 MB monthly upload cap to 1 GB a month.

Skitch is definitely my go-to picture annotation tool.  It is a free app, as well as a free desktop program.  Upload a photo, and add arrows, stamps, text, freestyle pens, shapes, even a pixelation tool.  (It can also annotate PDFs, if you have a Premium Evernote account.)  Although Evernote owns Skitch, you can use either product independently.   However, for Ms. Mishio's project, the power of their partnership becomes evident.

First, Christina created her own Evernote account.  With 8 groups to set up, Ms. Mishio then created a unique gmail account for each group.  (This can pay off later if she wants to incorporate some Google Drive tools into her classroom.)  With each email, she created an Evernote account.  Inside of each Evernote account she created a "Crime Scenes Group __" Notebook.  Inside the Notebook, she attached her directions and set up a few Notes with tables so student analysis would be ready to be gathered in a consistent format. Before exiting each Evernote account, she made sure to Share this Notebook with her teacher account, so that in real-time she could view the student work as it was completed, and eventually assess their results.

Next, Ms. Mishio made sure each iPad had Evernote and Skitch apps installed, and went ahead and logged into each appropriate group's Evernote account. (Keeping track that iPad #1 is logged into Group #1's Evernote account is key here.)   And with that, they were ready for the Crime Scene project.

In short, the students were highly engaged, and the impact in their learning was evident in the amount and complexity of their various text and picture Notes.  It helped that there was almost a game-like feel to the project; students actually walked through the school to designated areas, taking and annotating pictures, discussing and analyzing evidence.  By using Evernote, Skitch, and technology, they felt like 21st century detectives.

An example of a student group's Crime Scene Notebook

One recommendation from Christina was to go ahead and trust the students with the user names and passwords to the Evernote accounts.  Not only did that cut down on her having to log students back in if they accidentally logged out, but several students (unprompted by the teacher!) went ahead and downloaded the Evernote app to their smartphones and logged into their group accounts.  In this way, instead of being limited to one device per group, the ability to capture and analyze information doubled or tripled.  This could also allow students who were absent for part of the week-long project to contribute from home or during after-school hours.

Of course, using Evernote and Skitch in such a way could be easily tweaked for a variety of different content areas and projects.  Indeed, in a 1:1 environment, it could completely transform the way student work is created, saved, archived, and accessed.

Congrats to Christina Mishio for taking her integrated edtech leap and getting a well deserved #ShelbyTUITshoutout!

Hello Rockets!

It started with an Instagram picture last week.

Coming next Wednesday...

A photo posted by Adam Watson (@watsonedtech) on Oct 10, 2014 at 7:28am PDT

And now, I'm at school #4 on my year-long embedded tour: Shelby County High School.  In addition to that, it's the first school I've worked with in the district that has Lenovo Yoga Thinkpad laptop/tablet hybrid device, so that meant a new addition to the tech family.

Welcome the newest member to the Watsontech family: the Lenovo Yoga ThinkPad laptop/tablet hybrid, posing in tent mode. Proud parents iPad and MacBook Air stand behind their baby The Kentucky Room at SCHS will be our home for the next three weeks.

A photo posted by Adam Watson (@watsonedtech) on Nov 11, 2014 at 10:14am PST

(For those that don't know, it's a Windows 8 touchscreen computer with a "digitizer pen" that can "pose" in four different ways: laptop, stand, tent, and tablet.)

I'm looking forward to working with Mr. Oakley and the rest of the SCHS staff.  Although I might rename the Kentucky Room the Cardinal Room, if County's LMS Julie Webb will allow it.

In closing, I must say thanks to Mrs. Willhoite and the staff at Clear Creak for all of their hospitality and eagerness to learn edtech.  The journey continues!

TUIT: James Wampler, SCHS

And our first ever  #ShelbyTUITshoutout goes to James Wampler, an eighth grade science teacher at Shelby County High School, for suggesting the web tool Educanon.

First, a quick history.  I met James in mid-July in Shelby's New Teacher Induction. We quickly began chatting about edtech, and he asked, "Have you ever heard of Educanon?"  And I had to admit, nope.  Mr. Wampler told me he used it often in class and he was enthusiastic in its abilities and usefulness.

Short tangent: It was a great lesson about humility, as I had been on the job all of a few weeks and the first tool someone asked about was news to me.  But that's what I've said from the beginning: there are experts EVERYWHERE in our district. Now back to our originally scheduled programming.

Educanon is an interesting hybrid tool.  First, you choose existing video content from YouTube or other sources like Vimeo. Next, you add content in the form of multiple choice questions and other interactive choices at certain timed moments of the video; your finished product is called a "Bulb."  During the video, the Bulb stops at the points when an interactive moment was embedded. and students must read the text, answer questions, etc. before they okay it to proceed.  In an environment that is somewhat LMS-like (Learning Management System; Edmodo is a basic one), you can put these Bulbs in various classes for students to find and interact with online.  The results of their "quizzes" are saved for later data analysis.

You can imagine the power of Educanon in a flipped or blended experience; it builds in accountability to make sure each student not only watches the video outside of class or independently, but also comprehends the video and does critical thinking.  (You can see why I was eager to include it as a good starter tool for a flipped/blended classroom Prezi.)  However, a teacher could even use it a different way to present media.  At each stopping point, the teacher can answer questions by having students raise hands to vote for each choice, so you get a quick pulse of the room.  Or the teacher can have the students reflect and process on the portion of video they just watched.

You can have pretty good functionality with the free version of Educanon.  For $80 a year, you can get more interactive options, such as free response and automatic grading of short answer questions.  A bit pricey, but if you end up using it often, it may be worth it.

So, thank you to Mr. Wampler for putting another tool in my toolbox!  If you try or currently use Educanon, be sure to comment below with your thoughts. And if you have questions, find Mr. Wampler in the hallways of SCHS or give him an email.