BLC16

*This is Part 2 of an 8-hour session that takes place over two days - Sunday afternoon and Monday morning. 

The first five days of school can prepare students to "learn how to learn" and yield achievement dividends all year.   By preparing students to own  their learning and to manage tools and networks that will support them throughout the school year, we better prepare them for academic success.   Web literacy, student as tutorial designer, self assessment, peer to peer support and more will be  covered. A culture of empowered learning can help save teachers valuable time and inspire students.

Articulating vision and mission, managing change, and aligning technology to primary curricular goals are emphasized. We will explore the “leader as a role model” concept and look at various professional development opportunities, such as joining a global professional community.

We live in a world that is connected....Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Symbaloo, LinkedIn, Blogger...the list goes on and on.  And it isn't just us as educators....it is our young people too.  In this workshop, Sara Wilkie, Roy McCloud and Darren Kuropatwa will teach you how to get connected on various social media platforms, bookmarking websites, and teleconferencing websites.  They will share their own stories about getting connected and how they crafted brands for their learning spaces, schools and themselves.  This dynamic team will help you do the same as they walk through step-by-step directions with each platform and resource.  You will leave armed with the tools and confidence you need to be a connected educator and learner too. 

1. Participants will learn what it means to be a connected educator.
2. Participants will become connected with various social networks and online tools.  
3. Participants will create a plan to use social media and online tools to become a connected educator

Between the first screen, the movie screen, and the fourth screen in your pocket were two others. They have dramatically changed the ways in which we work, learn, play, and live together. Increasingly, our online lives breed a lack of inhibition not seen offline while simultaneously the phones most kids have in their pockets make all spaces learning spaces and potentially shift learning times to any time. 

This session will model conversations educators can take back to their schools about cultivating empathy and empowerment in our students to combat a host of social issues around student use of social media. Participants will leave with a wealth of powerful visual material and discussion starters they can use in their schools with their students. We’ll share ideas to effectively lead these sort of difficult conversations and share resources we can easily access anywhere any time.

Explore a variety of FREE student response services/tools that work on any device and give teachers the power to make informed instructional decisions. This session will be a rich source of ideas, resources and information for effectively using technology for formative and summative assessment.

Attendees will:

-Learn about specific free services/tools that transform assessment (and make teachers’ lives easier)

-Examine the advantages of each tool and how to use these resources effectively to engage students and personalize learning

-Discover how these services/tools can give all students a voice and make thinking visible

-Participate in an activity that can be replicated with staff and students

Be sure to bring a device to fully participate in this interactive session!

It might sound like the Parisian Left Bank but it could be your course. It’s time to re-imagine the environments in which our students learn, whether we teach in a traditional classroom setting, offer a hybrid course, or teach completely online. One possible model is the “Café - Studio - Stage”, which facilitates distributed cognition, peeragogy, maker culture, and radical transparency. What are the essential elements of these “spaces” - whether they be physical or virtual - and what tools are useful in managing student learning, production, and amplification of student work? The “Café” fosters community and is the hotbed for discussion of ideas, but can also include individual research and reflection, curation, and student-lead teaching. The “Studio” provides the “whitespace” for students to produce artifacts. The synchronous aspect of “studio time”, even in a purely digital realm, is characterized by a creative energy much like the classic artist studio. It is a time for brainstorming, prototyping, collaboration, and for formative feedback. Finally, the “Stage” constitutes the various platforms available to share and showcase student work and learning with the goal being a sense of relevance via an authentic audience as a well as the obligation to contribute to socially-constructed knowledge.
We’ll discover ways to promote transparency and assist students in amplifying their work and connecting with experts in the field. The combination of curation, creation, reflection, and amplification leads to the cultivation of a positive digital presence, where students not only consume but contribute to knowledge production.
Participants will be come away with relevant activities they can replicate in the classroom (MS-Higher ED) and are encouraged to begin to develop an action plan for implementation. A full website of resources curated by the presenter is available as a take-home “goodie-bag”.

What are your students thinking and how do you know? Alan November asks  ‘Are there opportunities for students to make their thinking visible?’  At the International School of Amsterdam a culture of thinking is embedded into our philosophy, programme and curriculum. We want students to think about thinking and therefore we embrace the opportunities that technology provides to facilitate.

Join us to explore how we use a range of technology tools with primary aged students to make thinking visible. See how self and peer reflection is an integral part of learning in our classes. We will share our experiences with screencasting, movie-making, book-making, mind mapping, digital portfolios and collaborative projects across a range of curriculum areas. Some of the tools we have used include: Book Creator, Explain Everything/DoodleCast Pro, iMovie, Adobe Voice, Padlet, Poplet, Voicethread amongst others.

As educator George Couros says, “innovation is not about a skill set: it's about a mindset.” And, a mindful mindset is at the heart of education. 

A resilient, open, curious, healthy mindset makes for an ideal learning landscape, and mindfulness is a key part of the equation. Come join this workshop to build core mindfulness skills while exploring key creative applications across the curriculum. Understand and investigate the neuroscience behind modern mindfulness practices, and discuss innovative, integrated ways to build mindful exercises into active class time, personalizing and fitting the context of a dynamic classroom community.

When we, as engaged participants in an education community, use mindfulness methods as a means to build self-awareness, focus, and creative ideation, we can call ourselves “neuro-networkers”. We’re actively using mindfulness to change our minds and connect with others— in powerful and innovative ways! Everything, from design thinking, creative ideation, presence in social media, and applications across the curriculum, stems from here.

This session focuses on mindfulness and its active application across three arenas, using it to: 
- increase focus (concentration)
- promote presence (awareness) 
- boost empathy (connection capacity for relational trust)

Worksheets: we all use them, and they provide quick and valuable feedback; but are you (and your students) tired of giving the same worksheets day after day? Transform that boring worksheet into a fun and engaging assessment, with or without the help of technology. This session will demonstrate a variety of ways for assessing students, using tools like Poll Everywhere, Google Forms, Plickers, Bingo, and more!

Reading to self, reading to someone, working on words, writing and listening to reading are all important parts of any literacy program. The two sisters have given us a wonderful framework with this Daily Five model. How can iPads make this structure even better? We’ll explore apps, tools and methods that can help you take advantage of this powerful learning tool.
Download the free Pic Collage for Kids app before you come and we’ll do some word work learning together.
You’ll leave with
• An understanding of ways to use iPads to improve literacy.
• Ideas for ways to make technology use meaningful in your classroom
• A digital handout with all of the information presented.

The recent explosion of social media and the connections that media allows have the ability to revolutionize classroom learning. Even young students can be global learners and connect with people and classrooms outside of their building, city or country. We’ll discuss why you would want to do this, curriculum connections and the practicalities of how to make it work in YOUR classroom. You’ll leave with
• A list of tools that help young children to connect
• Ideas for using connections to enrich your curriculum
• Suggestions for choosing effective tools
• An online handout with the material from the presentation

Graph literacy is the ability to identify important features of a wide variety of graphs and relate those features to the context of the graphs—in other words, to increase your understanding of graphs' meaning. According to the Common Core State Standards, English and language arts teachers, as well as math and science teachers share the responsibility for teaching students to understand graphs found in books, magazines, and newspapers, and on the web. By using the Graph Literacy activities middle school students investigate equivalent graphs, learn to interpolate values, discover the difference between dependent and independent variables and find linear trends on graphs and use these trends to find corresponding linear equations. This workshop will allow you to try out the graph literacy activities and see how they would fit in your school. Project materials are free and available online or through the Apple AppStore.

Every child lives in a watershed and, thus, is a watershed steward. The Teaching Environmental Sustainability curricula is unique in that it allows students to visualize the impact of human action on his/her watershed using an online modeling application called Model My Watershed. It also permits students to engage in land planning exercises that allow them to immediately see the potential impact of changes on their watershed. By linking processes that act at the local scale to conditions that occur at a larger scale, the Model My Watershed web application lets students link their own observations of nature to scientific models of complex environmental systems. This workshop will allow you to try out the Teaching Environmental Sustainability activities and see how they would fit in your school. Project materials including Model My Watershed application are free and available online.