Running Into the Future of Education

How to narrow and decide what tools to use this coming school year. With distance learning in place for me at least through Oct 30, I want to limit the number of tools I use in my math classroom to allow students to become proficient and comfortable with them.  I will for sure be using Google Classroom to organize and manage assignments. My current plan includes:  Pear Deck: To engage students during live activities as well as for fun check-ins. Screencastify: Both for recording direct instruction and the new submit tool to have students record journals of learning and assessment. EdPuzzle: To deliver video recording with formative assessment questions embedded. Desmos: For practice and assessment both formative & summative. Google Tool including Docs, Sheets, Forms: For a variety of uses including assignment instructions, hyperdocs, rubrics, etc. I am also exploring a new to me tool  Floop  which seems like a great way to make giving feedback on math problems ea...

Last week we working with 7 amazing teachers from our program to write curriculum. This always leads me to thinking about planning for the classroom and how the work we are doing affects this task. Now I am not currently planning for a classroom of students as my planning involves my work with teachers, but this process somehow seems mystical for many. When I was starting in my own classroom many years ago, I was lucky enough to have many mentors helping me through some of this work especially as I transitioned to the world of education and alternative curriculum. Over time, my process evolved as I moved to different places and had to adapt to the expectations of each. The most recent version went something like this... explore the standards for the bimester (the 2 month grading periods we had in Mexico) and find the main themes. Explore both my own collection of resources as well as those found through blogs and websites for material for a unit project. Design the unit project and u...

Back in July as I transitioned from Mexico City to New York City, I also transitioned from the classroom to being an instructional specialist (coach). It is a new challenge that I was ready to accept. And being a new role, it has been a challenge though totally fab. I have an amazing team of colleagues who are super supportive and am working with a cool group of teachers and schools. I am doing some very different types of things - doing inquiry of student work with teacher teams, observing classes, and  coaching teachers. It is fun, nerve-wracking and exciting all at the same time. I hope to share some of my insights here as I work in this role. So far, it has been an education in school cultures and teaching styles. Stay posted...

Inspired by the wonderful group of ADEs I met at my institute, I decided to try some flipping the classroom in my 8th grade math class. I created my very first video of instruction...  http://youtu.be/XznkLRH3Z_U ... and hope it to be the first of many. This one is a simple direct instruction video made using my  InterwriteMOBI TM and their Workspace software along with QuickTime Players screencast with audio function. I used iMovie to do a quick edit and published it to YouTube from there. It was pretty easy though I am sure not what will be my finest work.  I am hoping this gives the students who take longer to copy notes down the time they need and the ability to replay as often as needed. Also to refer back later for review.  Let's see how it goes tomorrow in the classroom. Check back for details. What do you think of this first video?

Well a bit more than a week has gone by since the institute and I am still excited about all I learned. I went in not quite knowing what to expect, but already there have been huge benefits. I have connected to a learning community of teachers around Mexico who all understand what it means to integrate technology. There were so many different examples of way to do this at all levels brought out during the week's presentations from each other and I continue to see them posted on our Facebook group and through emails and on our ADE community. It is very exciting to continue to work on our projects and learn from each other. Things you thought you were great at, you find your are good at, but came home with new ideas to make you even better. I am excited to be a part of this community and hope to bring great ideas to others and share what I am learning and experiencing.

Day 3 was the day to figure out project groups. Our main idea had a group of 11 people and it took us a while, but we finally came up with a theme and broke into smaller sub-groups. Yesterday we outlined our project and now each know what we have to do by what deadline. Today we will present our ideas to the big group and hopefully get some good feedback. I feel like I have a good handle on what I need to do going forward. Day 3 had another talk from Bill Frakes where he shared not only more videos, but the stories behind the videos as well.  He finished up with a show of his favorite Sport Illustrated photos he has done.  Then yesterday, we also had an inspiring talk from Bill Rankin. (You can watch his TEDxDubai talk here .) He gave us visionary thinking about the design and direction of schools. One of my favorite points was that a lecture hall is a place for rhetorical questions. And a very cool photo walk around town will Bill Frakes teaching us about using ...

Had another great day!! Learned more about fellow ADEs and had a few guest presenters as well. Saw some great stories told through video and some great ways of thinking about how to tell a story from Marco Torres, Bill Rankin and Julie Garcia. The University of Guanajuato is a beautiful place.  Tonight, I had my photo taken by a pulitzer prize winning photographer, Bill Frakes, with help from his assistant & editor Laura Heald and we started to write down ides for what group we want to be a part of for our project. Thinkning science development right now, but anything can happen tomorrow. Will keep posting. Meals have also been a good time to connect and meet new people.  And lastly beautiful night views.

Half of today was spent in travel on the bus. It was quite empty... only 4 of us. Some not so good movies played, I crocheted a bit and napped too. I was so excited to get to Guanajuato and meet the other ADEs and I was not disappointed. First I got all my paperwork and swag... yah for fun apple water bottles and bags and mugs and pens... and also an iPad to borrow for the next few days. I think the bad part of that is that I will want to go out and buy one once I leave. Before heading into my room to meet my roommate for the week, I went into the conference room next door and ran into Marco Torres whom I had met during my time in Sweden. Boy is the world sometimes small. He is a past ADE and here to share some of his amazing knowledge with us. I met so many amazing people tonight from schools around Mexico as well as ADEs from the US and people from Apple too. I can't wait to learn even more about them and start working. Tomorrow we will get lots of info on tools and start ou...

Tomorrow morning I am off to Guanajuato for my week of training. My Double-Click presentation is ready to go... now I just need to put my stuff in my bag, transfer some files and get some sleep. Last day of 21-day yoga challenge is tomorrow so I need to get that in before I leave.  More coming soon... View Larger Map

Happy 2012!! With the start of the new calendar year, I will make another start to this blog. I am setting a goal to write in this blog once a week. I take this on to not only challenge myself to share my reflections, but also since I am about to become an Apple Distinguished Educator here in Mexico. My training is at the end of this month for which I am soooo excited to be a part of. This will help me to focus on gathering ideas and material for the training as well as for myself. See you later this week for my 1st new post. :)

So I am embarking on my journey to use SBG in my classroom. I have started with my grade 8 classes in both math and physics. At first introduction (today was Day 1), the students seem interested in the idea though I know that weaning them (and their parents) from number grades on every assignment to feedback will take time. I have decided to start the year using the idea of green light, yellow light, red light for how they are doing on each standard. I have a feeling that I may need a wider scale, but will revisit this with the classes' feedback in a few weeks time. I wanted to share the standards I picked for both Math 8 and Physics 8; both based on Mexico's SEP curriculum. I am not sure if they are too general and I should be more specific. Please take a look and let me know what you think! Math 8: Understanding numbers, ways of representing numbers, relationships among numbers, and number systems  Understanding operations and how they relate to one another  Comput...

As classes ended today and we have student led conferences left, I have moved on to yearly plans and first bimester (what a grading period is called here in Mexico) plans for next year. As I begin my journey into setting up an SBG classroom, I realized that my 1st step is looking through the curriculum and finding what standards I will work on during each bimester. I am using NCTM to help me with this as well since I need to translate from Spanish into English. I am also in the process of reorganizing the Mexican SEP curriculum into an order that will flow. Right now, they are integrating topics in a way that does not work well for me. I was given the go-ahead to reorder as long as I can show that I am still getting to all the ideas I should. After this, it is time to start finding #anyqs to create math stories with. I am using Dan Meyer's idea of the 1 acts as I plan these for math class. Also will probably use some in my physics class as well as other hands-on explorations. ...

I will start off my new edublog with a reposting of my top 6 take-aways from the ISTE11 conference which I just returned from. It was an amazing 4 days in Philly. So the last days have been filled with meeting lots of people... some new and some I already knew digitally (via Twitter and blogs), posters, presentations, discussions and the like. These are my 6 highlights so far: #6 - Walking around the exhibition hall and seeing presentations from many vendors including Google, Adobe, Livescribe and more. #5 - Volunteering at an ASK ME station on Sunday afternoon. After I finished I knew my way around this huge Philadelphia Convention Center. #4 - Attending sessions of all kinds, from ISTE Unplugged, Poster sessions, Google Educators talking about Google Apps for education, international initiatives of ISTE, Music and Tech (great presentation by people I follow on Twitter - lots of good ideas even for non music people), Learning Tools Family Feud (all the stuff was cro...