Tech Coach Slice

I am 1 of 4 tech coaches. I work in a district that has approx 3,200 students, approx 300 certified staff members, and 8 schools. I have been in the district for 31 years. I travel to all 8 schools to help teachers use our 1:1 iPads effectively with students. Over the 8 years that I have been a coach, I have developed many good relationships with the staff who have stayed (we have a very high turnover rate). This past week while I was heating up my lunch in one of the teacher workrooms (there is NO lounging going on - don't like the words teacher's lounge) one of the social workers came in. We greeted each other.  She proceed to tell me about an issue she was having with Google Forms. She set up self-assessment forms for students in her small groups. She was asking what was the best way to share them with her students.  After some questioning, I suggested she share them via Schoology, our LMS. I spotted her computer under a pile of papers, so I asked if we could do it together at that moment. She was not in a hurry, so we did. Then I showed her how to get notifications when someone submits a form. She didn't even know that I was possible. I shared some additional information. By this time both of our meals were heated up. She was super appreciative.

Why do I tell this story? These small moments of supporting teachers were not happening during COVID, or even earlier this year. Even though we have been in person all year this is my first small moment like this of the school year. Pre-COVID these were happening on a very regular basis, maybe even weekly. This small moment filled my bucket for the day. Looking forward to more small moments and longer coaching cycles! 

We Wrote a Book - Leveraging Professional Relationships

Here is a slide from a professional development session that we gave at IDEACon, Illinois's state ed-tech conference a couple of weeks ago. 

Lucy and I, on the right, wrote a book for Book Creator. Book Creator is an app that students can use on any device to write and publish their own books. The book we wrote is called Supporting Language Learners with Book Creator. Someday I will write a post about the process of writing a book for an app company. This post is about how that all came to be. Book Creator's parent company, Tools for Schools, is located in Bristol, England, UK. I'm not exactly sure how Dan Kemp and Dr. Beth Holland got to know each other. I assume it was through social media and Beth's work at Ed Tech Teacher a based Boston based company. I know Beth because I worked for Ed Tech Teacher when they did workshops in Chicago back in 2013. Beth was a lead trainer for Ed Tech Teacher for many years. I attended a workshop and the next year I found myself working for them as a helper in the room when they provided subsequent professional development sessions over the next 3 summers in Chicago. Beth and I continued to keep in touch over the years, mostly through Twitter and Twitter DMs. Beth lives in Rhode Island. Fast forward to the spring of 2018.  Dan Kemp, BC Marketing and Community Manager approached Beth to see if she knew anyone who used Book Creator with ESL students. Beth immediately thought of my team leader and me. We are a very tech-focused and innovative district. Beth reached out, to my team leader at the time, to see if she and I were interested in writing a book for Book Creator.  At the time my team leader had too much on her plate, so she said no to the opportunity. I, on the other hand, don't know how to say NO. I asked the new biliteracy coach in our district if she was interested in writing the book with me. She said YES! In reality, I could not have done it without her. Her knowledge and expertise in this area was invaluable. Not only was Lucy our new biliteracy coach, but I taught her children when I was a classroom teacher. Over the next 4 months, we navigated writing and editing a book! It was a stressful and wonderful experience all at once! I got paid to write a book! How cool is that?!!!!

The moral or lesson here is to keep and honor those professional relationships that you make. You never know when you might be able to leverage them for good! Part of a good PD session is being a good storyteller and I love telling this story of connection and leveraging relationships. 

A True Slice - Gee willikers

 My last 2 posts were definitely the usual ed tech or techie posts that I like to do. This one is really more of a slice of teacher life. I have to include some techie stuff in this post, though,

Gee willikers

Yesterday I was working in one of our middle schools doing the Anne Frank House VR on Meta Oculus Quest 2. The students studied WWII and specifically the Holocaust. I go into our 8th-grade classes in both of our middle schools to run the VR experience while teachers and students work on other work. Students cycle through with about 5 minutes each in the experience. I really believe in the power of VR for our students (and others) to gain a sense of empathy after participating in an experience like this. Also, our students come from low-income families so only about 1/3 of them have experienced VR let alone own a $300 unit personally. 

That's a little tech background for you - now to the slice. 

Since many students have never experienced VR before some of them have very strong reactions once they put on the headset for the first time. An 8th-grade boy put it on yesterday and exclaimed, "Gee willikers!" I have not heard that expression used in years. The thing that also made it funny was that I had been using the term "coolio" with the students and the teacher in the room, who happens to also be a friend who is my age, was razzing me for using 90's lingo and thinking I was talking to the kids on their level. In both cases the slang was outdated. Does that matter? Did we both get our point across even though we used outdated slang? I was really surprised to hear something like that come out of a 13 y/o's mouth. I asked him, "Are you 90?" He said no, of course. I asked him where he hear that. He said he couldn't remember. 

In closing I will say -- This is why I love my job - kids really do say the darndest things and every day is different! 

Gee willikers slicers! 

Sketchnoting and Read Alouds - Part 2

 You can read part 1 here.

After visiting all 18 homerooms for the sketchnoting mini lesson it was time to model read alouds for our staff.  Our building literacy coach worked with teachers to find the right book for each classroom. Some of the books were chosen by teacher suggestion and some where chosen by the literacy coach based on the standard(s) that the teacher was currently working on. Some of the teams, comprised of 3 teachers each, chose the same book to work on the same skill. The literacy coach worked hard to prep each book. When I showed up to help support her I saw that she had Post It notes on some of the pages. These were to remind her what probing questions to ask and when to remind the children to do a turn and talk. Turn and talk expectations were reviewed before starting. Each read aloud was done very intentionally. The lens given for each story matched the standard, of course. Here is what students were asked to include in their sketchnote: 

Kinder - beginning, middle & end of story

1st - character, setting, problem, & solution

2nd - lesson or moral

3rd - character traits

4th - show what happened in an historical text with text evidence

5th - how did a character respond to challenges in the story or how did the character feel about the challenges in the story

Before we started 3 teachers were practicing sketchnoting with their students. After my initial mini lesson an additional 10 teachers reported doing sketchnoting with their students at least one more time since I had been there. That's 3/4 of the staff! Some of the teachers even sketchnoted with us! #winning

We were again blown away by what the students were able to create. Students liked it and were generally successful. What I noticed while I was doing my mini lesson and the subsequent read aloud was that I could tell which teachers don't use the iPads with their students on a regular basis. At the very least these teachers are not using the iPads for creation, but only drill and kill apps that the district pays for, for our intervention programs. Hopefully, this project will get one or two of the laggards to change their tune. I can hope - can't I? 

If you want to see pictures check out my Twitter feed. https://twitter.com/rmbtowner_tech. 

Finally, our literacy coach is AMAZING! Her intentional modeling was spot on! 

 

Below is a screenshot of the planning doc for the read alouds.

Sketchnoting and Read Alouds - Part 1

We have been using Apple's Elements of Learning as the backbone for our tech integration in our district. With a special focus on Communication and Creation (1 type) and Real World Engagement. One of the schools I work with was looking for an entire staff project for communication and creation. I was at another school listening to their literacy coach talk about doing purposeful read-alouds and it sparked an idea for me. What if we paired purposeful read alouds with sketchnoting? Sketchnoting is something I've been trying to "get off the ground" for the last few years in our district. We bought our students Logitech Crayons during COVID.

Back to the idea. 

The teachers were very open to the idea b/c they like the idea of students being fully engaged during a read-aloud. The building literacy coach and I also thought that some teachers could use some modeling in the way of purposeful read alouds. We were so glad the teachers didn't think of it as One More Thing, especially this year! Hence a coaching collaboration was born! 

We made a plan to collect some baseline data from the students. The questions we asked were - 

1. Do you know what sketchnoting is? 

2. Do you like read-aloud time in your classroom? 

3. Do you think drawing or doodling helps you learn? 

We used Poll Everywhere to collect the data electronically. 

I went into each of the 18 homerooms and did a 1/2 hour mini-lesson, "Getting Started with Sketchnoting: A Pershing Project". First I showed some examples of sketchnotes from kindergarteners and first graders. I made the point that a person from kindergarten and older could do this. Plus kids liked seeing their work in the slide deck. We talked about the apps available to them on their iPad or the fact they could choose to do their sketches with pencil and paper too. Next, we talked about the fact that sketchnoting is about IDEAS NOT ART (read that again if you've never heard it before). We practiced drawing the 5 elements that can be the start of, or part of any and all drawings - square, circle, triangle, line, and dot. If you can draw those you can draw anything. We talked about everyone making their own meaning of the pictures and words that they put on their paper/"paper". I also told them the only wrong answer was if they didn't try. Finally, we finished with a set of quick draws. They had 1 minute each to draw the following: cup, house, book, happy, person, pizza, idea or thought, and jump. Happy, idea or thought, and jump are either not nouns or not nouns that you can touch. I was blown away by what the kids were able to draw. They represented idea or thought in a number of ways - thought bubble, question mark above the head, just a brain with a question mark in it, a light bulb, and a lightning bolt. Genius! 

I had to do it virtually one day because of a severe weather day. 

Also, I sketched a logo to go along with the initiative. 

Part 2 posted here.