Building Learning Communities

Mozilla’s Doug Belshaw says that the “heart” of “digital literacies” is the Remix. Kirby Ferguson eloquently encouraged us in his TED talk to “Embrace the Remix”, because, as his enlightening documentary series reminds us, “everything is a remix”. Newspaper blackout artist and award-winning author Austin Kleon’s advice to budding creatives is to “Steal Like an Artist”, because “you are a mashup of what you let into your life”. Our students are engrossed in remix culture - they are the appropriation and recontextualization generation. Remix calls for knowledge and understanding, critical, higher-order, and design thinking, a variety of tech skills, and, frequently, collaboration and navigation in the greater media landscape. Most importantly a remix task offers students a chance to truly transform a work and create something unique - something that will contribute to their digital presence and legacy. This session is part pedagogical/philosophical and part participatory. Attendees will leave with a “goodie-bag” of resources and ideas as well as have the opportunity to develop, practice, and share several types of remix projects.

For this workshop I have developed an ever-growing G+ community to organize resources, and serve as a space for sharing participant work and continuing the conversation long after the conference has ended. The slide show offers a glimpse into the history of remix in the art world and its significance in our present media landscape. We’ll explore how different techniques of remix and mashup lend themselves to collaborative creativity and differentiation in the classroom. We’ll also look into the distinctions between “remix” and “rip-off” and discuss the ways in which to help work become transformative rather than mere copies. There will be some discussion of copyright reform, fair use, and creative commons as well. Philosophically we’ll look at the work of William Burroughs, Grandmaster Flash, and Andy Warhol as well as the more recent efforts of writer Austin Kleon, media theorist Henry Jenkins, MIT Media Lab Lifelong Kindergartener Mitch Resnick, documentary filmmaker Kirby Ferguson, and the online course DS106.

The workshop is peppered with a variety of hands-on activities, where we will use both digital and analogue tools and materials to create individual and collaborative projects. We will also play a version of “Disruptus”, a divergent thinking game that sharpens design-thinking skills. We’ll explore how social media in particular inspires recontextualization and re-imagining. And, in an era of ever-abbreviated communication, we’ll look at various ways to essentialize and synthesize into more minimalist, visual interpretations.

All participants should bring their own device and ideally have created a G+ profile as well as YouTube channel. It would also be extremely helpful to have a camera on one’s phone or the ability to take and upload images easily.

“There is no win, there is no fail, there is only make” (John Cage). One of the greatest challenges is developing ideas, finding time, and offering opportunities for students work on creative projects. More importantly, how do we move beyond the “assignment” stage and encourage students to be intrinsically motivated to make beautiful things on a regular basis? How do we foster the shift from consumption to production? Even if you don’t have the luxury of offering a project-based curriculum, you can still develop a steady diet of ongoing, “back-burner” projects that gets student to “dare to make and share”. This session will explore ways to instill a creative culture in your classroom, with everything from low-entry point crowdsourced uses of social media to the #showyourwork movement which asks students to be overt about their design thinking, creative process, and troubleshooting and contribute to collective knowledge. At the heart of personalized learning is creative freedom, but students often need a spark of inspiration, a design brief, or mentorship to get them on the road to making. In this workshop we will get our creative juices flowing and explore trends in combinatorial and crowdsourced creativity facilitated by social media, as well as the role of analogue elements in digital makery. You will have the opportunity to create and perform, as well as develop projects for future use. We’ll look at teacher-as-creator and the importance of transparency and curation in facilitating creativity in the classroom. All participants will leave with a "goodie bag"- a membership to an ever-growing digital community of resources and dialogue centering around creativity in the classroom.

Today’s top teachers are helping students become better writers using digital tools that foster an active dialogue between teachers and students. These teachers give personal feedback, improve learner engagement, and build a formative assessment model. Participants will hear how teachers in Ridgefield, CT transform the feedback they give students.

Goals:
• To share research-based, best practices about the formative assessment model for teaching writing.
• To share how digital tools foster opportunities to expand the ways teachers connect, interact, and develop student writers.
• To demonstrate how to effectively integrate the research and best practices into a class/school.
• To provide information about current resources that make responding to students effective and efficient.

What are your students thinking and how do you know? Alan November asks ‘Are there opportunities for students to make their thinking visible?' At the International School of Amsterdam a culture of thinking is embedded into our philosophy, programme and curriculum. We want students to think about thinking and therefore we embrace the opportunities that technology provides to facilitate.
Join us to explore how we use a range of technology tools with primary aged students to make thinking visible. See how self and peer reflection is an integral part of learning in our classes. We will share our experiences with screen-casting, movie-making, book-making, mind mapping, digital portfolios and collaborative projects across a range of curriculum areas. Some of the tools we have used include: Book Creator, Explain Everything/DoodleCast Pro, iMovie, Adobe Voice, Padlet, Poplet and Voicethread amongst others.

Looking for information and suggestions on efficient and useful ways to document student learning? Join us to see how we set up and use Evernote to keep ongoing records about student learning. These records are dynamic, can be easily shared with colleagues and are accessible across platforms.
Areas covered will include:
*Documenting progression
*Anecdotal notes
*Reading records
*Photos of learning
*Collecting student work samples sent via email
*Storing and organising notes and emails from parents and colleagues

Teaching young children to code is not just for the technology classroom it is for every classroom. In this workshop we will answer all the following questions and more.
Why code in the elementary school? What are the benefits, drawbacks, and connections to Common Core? What do I need to know to get started? What are the available resources for different age groups and multiple technology platforms? Can you program without using a computer or tablet? What are unplugged lessons and how do I implement them? What do kids that are coding really think about coding?

Participants will adopt the ""Lesson Crash"" model, take it to their home districts, and make it their own. Participants will recast their ""coaching"" into ""crashing"". Like in the TV show, Yard Crashers, I.T. Crashers will meet teachers where they are, help them on projects they are already working on, and celebrate every tiny success along the way. This will be documented via audio and video, packaged as a mini-TV series in their districts, and played to celebrate the wonderful tech integration happening in every classroom. Instruction Technology will become the celebrated P.R. that teachers have been looking for. Even though most campuses and districts reward a single teacher of the year, Lesson Crashers will help reveal and celebrate the variety of talent hiding in each and every school hallway. Do you have a lesson you want to trash!? Get it Crashed!!!

Our program seeks out great teachers who have identified an area of weakness where a little tech could really help. The entire Crash event is a celebration of strengths, commitment to student achievement, and the recasting of Instructional Technology in education as a team effort from top to bottom.

The workshop creates a case for project-based learning, making, tinkering, and engineering. We will discuss strategies for creating an effective setting even with limited space restrictions. Provide powerful ideas on how to create an inquiry based approach that uses the global maker movement combined with lessons in entrepreneurship to teach critical 21st century skills. Participants will have the chance to tinker with a range of exciting new low- and high-tech construction materials that can really amplify the potential of your students.

Peer instruction is a powerful pedagogical tool for teachers. Have you tried it? Students teaching students. Online tools like Socrative and Google Forms can assist staff in creating assessable peer instruction opportunities. How can we make it even more motivating for students? In this session we will look at methods such as student creation of questions, both closed and open ended, as well as integrating principles of game design into the team aspect of peer instruction.

This session will showcase how twitter, the Edcamp movement including its online versions like Edcamphome, and entering the blogosphere can empower teachers to take control of their own professional development and build their own professional learning network (PLN). In an age when professional development has truly been democratized, teachers can now gain access to experts in their fields and utilize their professional learning networks to become the master learners that students and schools desperately need. This session will begin with a synopsis of one teacher's journey and the impact self-directed professional development has had on her teaching and her students. The session will then provide attendees with a variety of different resources that will enable them to create their own professional learning network.