Greenhaus Education and Other "Effects"

I am feeling like a proud parent after my final face-to-face meeting with my two teacher cohorts.  After 6 months together, this final meeting was all about them sharing what they each have been doing in their classrooms with Sketchpad and Sketchpad LessonLink and focusing on Common Core Standards while integrating technology into math instruction. Just like a parent, I merely started them on the path and guided as needed. They, through personal motivation and interest as well as with the support and guidance from each other, have personalized what they have learned, adapted it to fit their needs, and shown change not only in skills but in confidence about teaching the Common Core Standards, teaching with technology, and listening to their students and helping students deepen mathematical understanding. From my most recent post , my final lesson was: Lesson Six: Provide the opportunity for sharing, presentation and peer feedback to model the professionalism, collaboration, a...

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....

In my most recent post in my hybrid/blended PD series, Planning for Hybrid PD (part 3) - Make it Relevant , I was about to embark on my 3rd face-to-face meeting with the teachers. I have met with the groups and have to say, I think relevancy was definitely the thing to focus on, for two reasons. 1) After almost 3 months working together, with 2 previous face-to-face meetings and 2 online components, the teachers are feeling comfortable with each other and really willing to voice their frustrations, ask for help or ideas, and share strategies. 2) They feel much more comfortable with the software themselves and are actually thinking of how it could work with their students, so they are want lessons that fit what they teach, since that's an easier stretch as they try something new. How did these two reasons fit into my goal for this third face-to-face meeting of making it relevant?  As I said previously Lesson Three: Make the activities and learning relevant to the teachers every-d...

This week is my third face-to-face set of meetings with the two groups of teachers I have been embarking with in the hybrid, or blended, professional development journey. We are focused on learning and integrating dynamic mathematics into math instruction using The Geometer's Sketchpad . We are just coming off our 2nd online unit, about to start our 3rd cycle.  This particular online unit was significantly shorter (3 weeks) compared to the first one (5 weeks), so a much quicker turn-around (my feedback on that can be found in my last online community posting). In my first two parts of this series on blended learning, I went into each face-to-face workshop with specific lesson or goal to focus on: From Planning for Hybrid PD (Part 1): Lesson One: 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 ...

Learning Pod at LWF 2012 Conference I have just returned from a week in Scotland and London, some of it personal vacation and some of it professional growth on my part, as I attended the Learning without Frontiers conference in London.  That experience in itself was amazing - listening to so many great speakers (Noam Chomskey, Sir Ken Robinson, Conrad Wolfram, etc.).  I will be posting some reflections on those talks at a later time, after I have had some time to reflect and gather my thoughts on what they said.  Overall, my time in the UK last week was just an incredible experience on so many levels but as I am still suffering from jet lag, I think it best to hold off on sharing those experiences! I did want to update on the hybrid PD I am working on - we are currently in our second online Unit and it is not going as well as I had hoped, as I still am struggling with participation from many folks in both cohorts.  As I posted in my Part 1 piece, I had made so...

Those of you who are teachers know what I am talking about - that moment where you say "oh, if I could only go back to 'first period' (or 2nd block - whichever  class was the first one) and reteach this lesson they would get it so much better!"  Practice does really make perfect (well...better any way), as I said in Tuesday's post . I did the second day of face-to-face with my middle school teachers (see related post ) , so basically a repeat of day one with a different content focus, and as is usually the case, learned from my first experience.  Spent more time on the software basics, cleared up some misunderstandings about the online course components - in general, fixed the errors made in the first night.  If only I could go back and do the first night over!  It made me think about all the years of teaching where I taught the same course for 3 periods - that poor first period class definitely got the short end of the stick! Let's face it, the more you do ...