BLC17

While the Great Disrupter of K-12 – online learning – is receiving the lion’s share of attention, the reality is that face-to-face, brick-and-mortar classrooms aren’t going away anytime soon. And, as such, it’s about time that educational technologists provide educators with innovations that go beyond enhancing teacher-led instruction and support teachers in taking real advantage of their 1-to-1 classrooms. Indeed, orchestrating classrooms where instruction moves seamlessly between small, collaborative groups and whole class conversation is education’s next challenge. Curriculum for such orchestration requires, we feel, a more supportive infrastructure than is currently available (e.g., on OER marketplaces, from LMSs). Towards providing just such an infrastructure for digital curricula, in our talk, we will describe the easy-to-learn, easy-to-use (really truly!) Collabrify Roadmap Platform (CRP) which provides teachers with support for the full life-cycle of a digital lesson (create/adapt, distribute, monitor, assess), where those digital lessons support students co-constructing richly-expressive artifacts and support dialogue amongst the groups and the teacher. The CRP, in classroom use around the U.S. is free, device-agnostic, and Google Classroom-friendly. Finally, the CRP can also support online classrooms, finally enabling isolated, online students to benefit from and engage in social, face-to-face classrooms, thereby in effect, merging online and face-to-face classroom instruction.

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are, according to research from John Hattie and Dylan Wiliam, high impact strategies on learning. Brian has been cultivating the PLC model with teacher and student technology advocate groups within his school for several years. In this session Brian will explore the highs and lows of the PLC learning journey, share best and next practice ideas and top tips to assist you on your road to establishing and/or developing PLCs in your establishment.

PS - also happy to present on Crafting Vision & Managing Change (we rolled out a new IMS and VLE two years ago - the narrative behind the psychology of change management and the tactics we used this is highly relevant to Technology & Curriculum Directors)

How can we promote, practice, and prepare our students to make the best decisions when living in a digital world? How do their decisions impact school culture and safety? This presentation will explore the evolution of Digital Literacy while offering resources and brainstorming next steps for attendees to take away and implement tomorrow. As we look to impact our community, student, parent and teacher input will be featured in this presentation as we look at the multifaceted need for strong Digital Literacy in our learning communities today. Session applies to both Elementary and Secondary.

Coming