Greenhaus Education and Other "Effects"

I am in the third online unit of my hybrid/blended PD so wanted to give some feedback and updates on how things are going online.  For those of you who have been following my hybrid/blended professional development series on integrating technology into math instruction (see a listing of all posts in the series at the bottom of this blog), you will remember that we just finished our third face-to-face meeting a couple weeks ago. My focus for this third unit (both f2f & online) is relevancy: Lesson Three: Make the activities and learning relevant to the teachers every-day teaching practice. By providing activities that focus on learning the skills, how to integrate technology appropriately, and also cohere to the specific content and curriculum the teachers must follow, it is more likely that they will begin to change their own practice. If they can see the relevancy to their own daily experience, they are going to be more willing to implement new tools and strategies....

I had my first of two face-to-face 3 hour sessions with teachers yesterday (the high school group).  As I mentioned in my previous post, Planning for Hybrid PD - Comfort Level and Confidence First , the goal was to figure out where the teachers were at and meet them at their comfort zone and give them confidence to start the journey of integrating the technology. Lesson one was to "Begin a professional development experience assessing the background skills of participants.Ensure they are given the necessary tools, starting points, and resources to feel comfortable with what they are going to be doing, see the purpose behind what they will be doing, and know where and how they can get continued support". I think I accomplished this fairly well, but can I just say, 3 hours goes fast!  I thought I had it mapped out well, but of course, the reality is there are questions and technology issues.  I spent less time on the software introduction than I wanted, but I made th...

I just got back from Asilomar, in Monterey, CA, where I was attending the CMC North Math conference.  What a beautiful place! Had a really great time talking to teachers about integrating technology into their classroom and ways they could use the technology resources they already had.  An interesting thing happened while exhibiting.  We were using an 'interactive white board' using a Styrofoam white board and eBeam to demonstrate our software ( The Geometer's Sketchpad, TinkerPlots and Fathom ), and so many people immediately assumed that the software only worked with a white board, therefore not of interest to them since they didn't have one. The purpose of using the interactive white board was merely to show the software better and allow others to interact and draw folks in to play.  What was revealed by talking to many of these teachers was really that they assumed that interactive, dynamic software could not be used unless you had a way for students 'tou...