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I Was Experiencing Personalized Learning in 1987

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I have been trying to catch up with episodes of George Couros’s excellent Innovator’s Mindset Podcast. Of course, I had to revisit the episode in which I was lucky to appear. While listening to it, I began to realize when I was talking about my favorite teachers. They were actually the ones who allowed me to experience personalized learning.  This is nearly 40 years ago! In 1997, the movie of the year was Beverly Hills Cop 2, and the biggest song of the year was “ Want to Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston.  Specifically, Mr. Vollrath, who I talked about in the episode, realized that it was not the ability to spell a word but to know what it means and use it in the proper context. As I write this post right now, I am still not the best speller, but there are tools that can assist me with it. I see red lines in Google Docs that alert me if I misspelled something. It’s like he understood the WHY of the words, which was not the spelling but the understanding of the words and the abi
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Answers for Action: Innovate Inside the Box Reflection

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The first day of school is a prime day for hearing the voice of learners. In some way, many teachers use a variety of tools to learn about the students they are welcoming into the classroom. The first day of my class is spent having students make passion pages . But like many of us out there, this information doesn’t necessarily transform the learning in my classroom in the ways that it could. In their new book Innovate Inside the Box: Empowering Learners Through UDL and the Innovator's Mindset , George Couros and Katie Novak make a point to stress the importance of discovering students passions One of the best ways to work with people is finding out what they love and tapping into it. The teachers who spent time finding out my passions made me feel like they had a genuine interest in who I was and what I loved. Couros, George & Novak, Katie. Innovate Inside the Box: Empowering Learners Through UDL and the Innovator's Mindset . IMPress. Kindle Edition. A quality formal
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Applications for Flipgrid Camera in the Classroom.

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The new Flipgrid Camera has many incredible features that can be utilized in the classroom. If you are unaware of these features, read about them here on the Ditch that Textbook blog post. In this brief post, I will touch on some possible applications in the classroom. Student Generated Keys By using the whiteboard background, students can work through the problem solving process. Not only can they show their work visually, students can talk through the problem solving process. The key here is making use of the pause feature in the recording for simple breaks. If students don’t have touchscreens and drawing is too difficult with a trackpad, encourage them to use text boxes. Check out this amazing video by Jen   Saarinen! Student Introductions At the beginning of the school year, many students are asked to complete worksheets explaining who they are in terms of who they are as a learner and person. Many teachers have innovated this process by having students introduce th
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Mo ISTE Mo Presentations!

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Well this week was my 2nd time attending the ISTE conference. This year I was able to attend a bunch of wonderful sessions. I even presented. I’d like to that the time to share out the resources from my sessions and the sessions I attended. I’d like to thank the people who were most directly responsible for me attending ISTE. Barbara Bray for inviting me to present as a part of her sessions. Dana Monogue the director of teaching and learning in my district when the opportunity arose for finding resources to support my journey. Dana is now the superintendent of another great Wisconsin school district. Finally, the innovative work done in my classroom is done in partnership with my co-teacher Andelee Espinosa . Learner Agency Learner Voice and Learner Choice are two major components to providing Learner Agency in the classroom. Too often, voice and choice are seen as a single aspect. In our session, Barbara Bray, Kerry Gallagher, and I teased out key aspects of and examples fo
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Summer Spark Day 1

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It takes a special type of educator to attend a conference in June. Many teachers have only been out of school for a couple of days. These are professionals who thrive on reflecting on their practice and gaining new ideas to improve their practice. These are the teachers who look at the world and see ideas that they can bring into the classroom tomorrow. These are the type of educators who attend University School of Milwaukee Summer Spark. This is my second year attending USM Summer Spark and I am amazed at the talent that they bring in to share out at sessions. With such an engaged groups of educators, I imagine it is one hell of a draw. Angela Maiers gave a rousing keynote focusing on the connections we make with learners and making them realize they matter. While there were many takeaways, one that stuck with me was setting up a structure to make every student in the classroom feel awesome at least once a week. The idea of recognizing 5 students from my classes a day in a person
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Don't Ditch that Tech

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I have greatly enjoyed Matt Miller’s Ditch Series of Books. On Friday, the 3rd in the series was released Don’t Ditch that Tech. It focuses on using technology to assist in differentiation in the classroom. Matt collaborated with Nate and Angie Ridgeway on this book. I finished the book very quickly. But is not the kind of book you will read once and put away. It will be a guide that I will continue to come back as I consider lesson design and implementation of technology. I appreciate that Matt, Nate, and Angie practice what they preach in this book. In a book about differentiation, they don’t attempt to present a one size fits all model. The book itself understands that teachers have different resources and that each lesson differs in what it asks the teacher and learner to be responsible for. The book identifies different models of technology implementation in schools. These range from situations in which schools have carts or labs which house the technology to be used to Bring
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Project Expo 2019: Bring the Parents in!

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When I attended PBL world 4 years ago, I was introduced to the idea of a project exhibition night. A night for students to share their learning beyond the classroom and with the greater school community. It was a night that wasn’t for grading. It truly meant for sharing of work. This week, we held our 6th project expo night. This event was directly inspired by the ideas I heard at PBL world back in 2015. I am proud of a lot of things that I’ve been able to implement in my classroom, and this is near the top of the list. One of the main reasons is the simple visual that one will see when they walk into the expo. Students talking about their work to parents. Open houses and science fairs are things that I am used to seeing at the elementary level. At the high school level, parents are rarely invited to events. Outside of athletics, these events tend to be performances by the arts. The other event the parents attend to learn about academic performance is parent teacher conferences. We
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Suite Science Practices: Investigations

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I have been slowly trying to implement the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) into my classroom. Our new Wisconsin State Science Standards were designed with the NGSS in mind. They align very well. So please forgive me if my language focuses on the NGSS in this post. In a previous post I discussed tools for dealing with models in science class. This post will focus on Planning and Carrying Out Investigations. As the name indicates, there are two major components to this practice 1) planning investigations 2) conducting investigations. Before looking closer at each aspect, we need to look at the purpose of investigations in science and engineering. To quote the practice according to Appendix F of the Next Generation Science Standards: Scientific investigations may be undertaken to describe a phenomenon, or to test a theory or model for how the world works. The purpose of engineering investigations might be to find out how to fix or improve the functioning of a technological sy
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