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 preparing for my final face-to-face meeting with the two cohorts of middle and high school math teachers I have been working with the past 6 months.  We will still have one more online component, which ends in June. I am a little sad about the fact that our journey is coming to an end, as it has been one of my most rewarding professional development experiences, in large part because I was able to really get to know these teachers both personally and professionally and actually see the progression of change and confidence as they learned and integrated Sketchpad into their mathematics instruction. A quick recap of the five previous face-to-face lessons, or focus you might say: Lesson One: Begin professional development experiences assessing background skills of participants. Lesson Two:  Work on building a sense of community and support among participants, where they feel comfortable sharing their struggles, their experiences, their ideas and expertise. ...

 Five weeks goes so much faster than expected! It's already time for me to do my next face-to-face workshops with my two cohorts in my hybrid/blended professional development. I will say I feel more excited than usual about the workshops because I really have a connection to these teachers now, something I don't often get to experience in my position.  Usually, I am in and out in a couple of hours, or a day or a few days, but with these two groups, we've been together, physically and virtually, going on five months.  I definitely think it's making what I have to offer and what they have to offer so much more connected and personal because we have had time to work through things, change things....time is not something that is often given in PD and it's been rewarding. Here's a quick recap of previous 'lessons' from the prior 3 face-to-face workshops: Lesson One: Begin a professional development experience assessing the background skills of participa...

 I am sitting here in the beautiful Hilton in Pearl River NY after 6 long hours of flying - rough day in the air with all this crazy rain and thunderstorm action. I am just going over my thoughts and practicing my presentations for tomorrow - you'd think I wouldn't need to do that after all these years, but I am definitely a worry-wart and want to just make sure I have my stuff together! I am doing two 1-hour presentations tomorrow at the Ten County Mathematics Association Conference in Orangeburg, NY. Both presentations are geared for elementary math teachers, focused on the Common Core Standards - one on TinkerPlots and one on The Geometer's Sketchpad .  I love doing these hour long sessions because they are quick and fun - it's so rewarding to work with teachers and show them exciting, hands-on, engaging software that really helps students 'get' math.  But - of course, the downside being it's only an hour.  The most you can realistically do in an hou...

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...

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...

Just completed my second round of face-to-face workshops with my two cohorts I am doing my blended learning professional development with on Sketchpad and technology integration in mathematics. In my previous postings ( Planning for Hybrid PD , Follow Up Day 1, follow Up Day 2, Online Community Part 1 , Planning for Hybrid PD Part 2 ), I have been documenting this professional development experience, sharing my planning process as well as what has been happening in the face-to-face and online components as these groups move forward.  The ultimate goal by the end of this process is that these teachers have not only learned the software, but more importantly, have learned  to integrate Sketchpad into classroom instruction to help their students learn mathematics in an engaging way that improves student understanding and achievement in mathematics.  This week we met face-to-face after teachers had a month+ online to try some activities on their own to help lea...

http://bostinno.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/05/community1.jpg My first thoughts are that it is NEVER a good idea to start something new with teachers, especially an online learning environment, right before the holidays!  Of course, I did not have a choice in the matter, so we are going to plug on, but unfortunately I think the fact that everyone is definitely in vacation mode is hindering some of the online community development that should be happening at this point. In my previous posts related to the hybrid PD I am working on for the next several months, Planning for Hybrid PD , Follow-up Day 1 , and Follow-up Day 2 , I reflected on what I planned to do in the face-to-face and gave some insight about what actually happened.  It has now been two weeks since my two cohorts have started their first online component and I wanted to share some thoughts on how that is progressing so far. I have posted a couple of course announcements (these automatically go to all parti...