New Forms of Professional Development

You have all been there… Professional Development days at your school…

Administration usually choose a topic, design the activities and/or bring in a speaker. Most likely,  they will be slides with bullet points…listening…turn to your partners…learning about a new initiative your school will take part in…etc.

As more and more educators are building PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) and taking their Professional Development into their own hands, they realize that their in house, school based PD needs to take on new forms as well.

The EDCAMP style PD is sweeping the USA and the world in order to honor the “experts” among ourselves versus bringing in “outside experts”. Conferences, like educon, edJEWcon or Innovate steer aware from the sage on stage lectures towards conversation style sessions. They aim to move from an exclusive “you physically have to be there” to inclusive virtual connections as an integral part of the learning experience. These conferences seek to blur the notion of a PD event as one moment in time and space to becoming the hub for growing one’s learning network and conversations for “just in time” learning beyond “just in case” tools or skills.

There has also been a wave of new styles of presentations beyond the traditional style lecture typically supported by bullet heavy PowerPoint sides. Take a look at TED style presentations or Pecha Kucha types (see Chris Lehmann‘s example at Ignite Philly above)  to spicen up presentations.

At a recent Professional Development day at our school, a “Hatzatah Presentation”style contest was held, open to our faculty. “Hatzatah”= Ignition in Hebrew,  is our Jewish Day School’s adaptation of  Pecha Kucha and Ignite. Each presenter had 5 minutes to share their idea, broken down into 20 slides which automatically advanced every 15 seconds. The winning prize was an iPad.

We gave them a wide open topic of  “How has/have iPad(s) impacted your teaching practice?” and shared with them a checklist outlining Presentation Logistics, Content, Presentation and Resources.

We asked three judges to take a look at the recorded Hatzatah presentations and choose a winneri. Mike Fisher from Digigogy, Lisa Johnson from TechChef4U and Richard Byrne from FreeTechnology4Teachers & iPad Apps for School, graciously agreed to be our judges.

Each of our “contestants” shared with me, that the process of creating these types of presentations (condensed to five minutes) have been an incredible source of learning for them.

In the spirit of sharing, allowing others to learn form our process, maybe even inspire the possibility of a new form of professional development at your school, here are the filmed Hatzatah presentations. What are some new forms of Professional Development you are  experiencing or experimenting at your school?

Karin Hallett (Liquid Literacy Blog)

Stephanie Teitelbaum (Teach Blog & Tweet )

Shana Gutterman (ShoshyArt Pinterest Board)

Seth Carpenter

Shelly Zavon (Teacher-Twenty-One)

Creating a Classroom eBook with BookCreator

It is no secret that I am a fan of the iPad app BookCreator since its release in 2011. Our students have created several eBooks with the app.

You can read about the creation, its process and even download the final eBooks on the following blog posts:

• Finally! A Book Creator App
• The Making of a Story in Kindergarten and Amplification Thoughts
• Step-by-Step: How to Create a Collaborative Class eBook
• First Graders- First iPad Encounters

One of the most important features of the app is the openness and responsiveness of the developer Dan Amos. He truly is interested and flexible to accommodate educators and their special needs in the classroom.

Our wonderful librarian Karin Hallett, who blogs on Liquid Literacy (a must subscribe blog) published a step by step recount of her process of creating a classroom eBook with current first graders.  (Tip: the student reflection video is especially interesting and the “Book Author Checklist” (see below), Karin created for first graders, is useful:)

Each student worked on their own iPad to create their eBook. We are working on stacking our eBook library with student created books, that will allow students to “leave a legacy” by making their books available for future students of their grade level. The challenge for us teachers was to combine each individual student book into one classbook. Each student book was to be a separate chapter.

Dan Amos had extended the new beta version of the new BookCreator to me and we were in luck that the ability to combine more than one book together was already included in the update.

Each student emailed me their eBook file, which I opened in BookCreator on my iPad. Once I had all eBooks in my BookCreator app, I simply chose to combine the books.

Again, Dan Amos was open to my suggestions to making the app even more intuitive and better for teachers wanting to create classroom eBooks. I had the following suggestions for him:

• copy title page when combining books
• being able select more than one book at the time to combine
• being able to insert pages at specific points in the book, not just the end.
• being able to duplicate pages

The app update is coming out of beta today and ready to be downloaded by everyone. I encourage you to upgrade quickly and start creating your own combined classroom eBooks!

Embedding Visuals Into Teaching and Learning

I confess, I am a visual learner! I also relate better to metaphors, since they paint a picture in my mind.

My eyes roll back when I see long passages of text, that I am supposed to read, digest, analyze, understand, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I can do it (I am an avid reader), but I can wrap my mind around concepts, thoughts and content better, if it is represented visually in some shape or form.

The majority of content presented to students in school is in form of text, the world outside of school bombards us with information in many forms of media beyond text.

Image licensed under CC by Trey Ratcliff

Our ability to navigate a media rich world and “read and write” in that world is increasingly important skill to posses.

Visual Literacy is defined by Wikipedia as:

the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image, extending the meaning of literacy, which commonly signifies interpretation of a written or printed text. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be “read” and that meaning can be communicated through a process of reading.

I have been working with one of our Middle School teachers, Morah Ita,  and her blog. She is steadily climbing the classroom teacher’s blogging step ladder. Her classroom blog has moved from being a static replacement of the weekly newsletter sent home and information “pushed” out for students to read and consume to a hub, where students respond to prompts from her, are able to read and comment on each other and allow a global audience to their conversation.

Another upgrade we are taking a closer look at now, is a move from TEXT HEAVY to a more MEDIA INFUSED writing style.

Inspired by the website Visual Writing Prompts, I took the text based journal prompts on her blog and “visualized” them.

From creating these visuals as a journal writing prompts, my thoughts turned to other subjects.

Our 4th/5th grade Math teacher is revisiting fractions. Part of her class needs more help than others in understanding and making sense of fractions.

Again, the idea was to bring more visual “real life” elements to a typically taught abstractly (with numbers) or with clipart (blocks or circles) concept. Just google “visual fractions” and switch from web to images.

The meta-cognitive process of creating the slides and thinking of a questions to go along with them gave place to another opportunity for the more “advanced” students. As the teacher works with struggling students, they would be able to create visual fraction problems for their classmates to practice and solve.

Our Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Yegelwel, shared the following on our school’s Professional Development Ning.

A seesaw is a perfect balance (given the right amount of weight on each side)! How do you teach heavy, light, equal to Kindergarteners? Using balances and connecting cubes in the classroom is good, but using their bodies on the seesaw outside is even better.  We (not me personally!) weighed ourselves, figured out which child weighed the same or almost the same as another child and then tried to balance on the seesaw.

The activity is excellent. I am so glad that the teacher documented it by taking the image to be later shared among colleagues and parents via her classroom blog.

I am wondering now though, how can we continue to upgrade and continue to infuse visual literacy for our 5 and 6 year olds?  Can we take images from objects the children are familiar with (ex. from around the classroom) and create visual questions for them. The objective is to teach students not only the concept of heavier, lighter, equal, but to give them the ability to see and evaluate images and transfer the concept to real life and vice versa.

PS. I used the (free)  iPad app Haiku Deck, in case you were wondering how the visual slides were created.

I have found the app to be perfect to quickly create good looking slides. The app is very intuitive. The fluency of the creation process is smooth.

1. Add your text (you are limted to up to two lines…which is a good thing!)

2. Choose an image (from Flickr’s Creative Commons pool or upload your own)

3. Choose the layout

4. Share your slides (export it as a PowerPoint file or send an e-mail with a link)

I then emailed the slides to myself, opened them up in PowerPoint and exported them as images to be uploaded to the blog. You can also view the slideshow on the iPad and take screenshots of the individual slides in order to upload them to a blog.

I am calling on all of you bloggers, presentation deliverers and teachers to

BREAK UP THE TEXT! Include less words, embed a variety of media to support you message/content, infuse visual literacy into your teaching!