Mo Physics Mo Problems

Today has been another great day at The Institute for Personalized Learning's annual convening. Key Note:  Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner The theme of today's keynote focused on the theme of Communities of Practice . A community of practice consists of individuals who are homogeneous in their goals and work together to achieve those goals in a variety of ways. Now, what was important to state was that to be effective, these communities must be intentionally created and formalized. The members of these communities need to come together and work for many different reasons: Help each other solve problems Hear each other's stories across contexts Reflect on practice and improve it Build a shared understanding Keep up with change Cooperate or innovate Communities can do this in a variety of ways Bring in a challenge to peer consult Debate a key issue Role play Model a practice Planning/producing a document on a large scale These communities

Finished this before dinner, forgive typos. Today marked day one of the Institute for Personalized Learning's 6th Annual Convening .  Last year was my first time attending and I was lucky enough to be allowed to share my experience in personalized learning at a breakout session .  After the first day this year, my head is spinning and I feel like I need somewhere to let what my senses picked up pour out and maybe take some shape.  So here we go. Keynote - Allison Zmuda This year's keynote address was by Allison Zmuda.   Here is a link to her presentation .  Save it, so much goodness within.  I just want to highlight some of my takeaways. During her address, she encouraged us to engage in a backchannel.  In this case, it was Twitter.  I started to think of possible ways for students to engage in backchannels during my lectures.  Think of this as encouraging responsible use of technology.  The only way students will learn responsible use of technology is if we show them.

I was privileged today to participate in a panel or assessment and grading in a personalized classroom as a part of the 2015 Personal Learning Convening facilitated by the Institute for Personalized Learning .   Jim Rickabaugh facilitated the panel which includ ed  Faith Lincicum, Frank Devereaux, and myself.   I'll discuss more of my takeaways in a future post.  But, I wanted to provide my prep notes from the panel discussion.

As students continue to work on their projects many of them are choosing to do some if not all of their work in Explain Everything because of its rich multimedia abilities in the iOS environment. I just wanted to give a quick overview of why I think Explain Everything provides endless possibilities for students to demonstrate mastery of objectives and ISTE standards . The video is about 12 minutes, so I'll leave it there.

In my class, we are 1:1 with iPads.  Students are creating their project videos on iPads.  iMovie for iOS is a powerful video editing software tool for iOS.  The user interface is very intuitive, but there are still many little features that students and teachers may not be aware of.  It can do a lot, but after working with iMovie on a Mac, the iOS version leaves a lot to be desired.  Students know the difference. It seems like every time we use iMovie on the iPads, we discover a new way it can't do something that the desktop version can do.  This usually leads to frustration and requires us to find workarounds. I just thought I'd give a quick tour of iMovie for iOS and highlight some features that are good and frustrating commissions. Adding Media is Easy On the right side of the screen, you can see the ability to sort from video, photo, and music libraries to decide what media to add to your project.  When a video is added it is easy to make audio and visual adju

As teachers, we tend to be told to introduce the rubric on day one of an assignment.  This allows students to know exactly how they will be graded.  But today was the day that we shared the product rubric with the students. The rubric can be seen below: I built this rubric using pieces from rubrics at bie.org . In my opinion, it doesn't seem logical to hand something like this the first week of the term before students have decided what their area of focus will be.  This seems like a specific document that will make more sense to students as they synthesize their data pieces to present. This rubric is the group rubric and that how the final project is graded.  Remember there have been individual summative pieces as the units have been completed to determine individual mastery of content.  The data from these pieces will provide the evidence for the final product. Today we had a bit of an issue during our class period.  The access the to the internet got sketchy and it w

One of my most formative video gaming experiences from childhood was playing one-on-one with my friends.  I don't mean outside on the court, I mean on a computer.  Yes, for those of you who aren't familiar with it one of the classic basketball games from the early 80's was a one-on-one game that pitted Larry Bird vs. Michael Jordan.  I honestly don't have any great insight here tying the game to my classroom, just had to mention the game. This week, my student in physics are putting together their final video project which is the culmination of the last 8 weeks of study.  All the data has been collected and the concepts have been covered, but they need to create a text which will summarize their work. Today was a day in which I spoke with groups about which concepts they would address in their video.  A day like today is one in which I hate the phrase "guide on the side."  I don't mind the idea of guide because in each of my conversations today,