Digital Storytelling in grade 8 Social Studies

In eighth grade social studies, we have studied 4 major units: Multicultural America, Formation of a Nation, Civil War to Civil Rights, and Conflict and Change. As part of our study of the Civil Rights movement, we started by analyzing the institution of slavery in America and the modern world, moving on to the American Civil War and ending with an individual research project on prominent Civil Rights leaders. In order to capture and communicate the deeper meanings of the movement to a general audience, we combined our 21st century research skills with the technology of iMovie to create a digital story on our selected Civil Rights leader. In addition to exercising our creativity, we simultaneously learned how to captivate the audience by presenting the movement in an informative and engaging way. See below for a selection of videos from all of grade 8. We hope you enjoy our efforts!

Thank you,
SAS 8th grader, Natasha O. (A Side) and 8th grade social studies teachers

If you can't view the embedded playlist above, click here to view.

SAS iPD - Individualized Professional Development

Reason for iPD

Our Ed Tech Team is always exploring ways to offer meaningful professional development for faculty and staff, and to facilitate our institutional commitment of the integration of technology. We received excellent feedback after hosting our last two Google Summits, so we successfully negotiated the use one of our calendared ‘late starts’ for our own mini summit. Our mini summit was an opportunity to acknowledge the wealth of talent within our school, and provide a forum to share what is going on within each division.

It was harder to find a good name for our mini summit than it was to find willing presenters! We recognized that one type of PD did not suit everyone’s needs - people want individualized professional development - so we had a name… iPD: Individualized Professional Development.

We ended up organizing an event that was the size of a conference. There were 60 sessions on offer, involving 54 presenters from all divisions, including Central Administration, and over five hundred participants. With such a wide variety of sessions we could provide participants with choice. It was a true team effort and its success was due to the wonderful team of faculty and staff that contributed.

Involvement of our Community

The organization of iPD was a community effort. The entire K-12 SAS Educational Technology team initially started the idea of this professional development within their regular meetings. Taking the idea to all division administrators and getting their support for using the late start time was an easy task. Vanessa Spiers and Amos Ong, from the Communications office helped to market and communicate out the event. To promote iPD, Amos designed a poster to show the variety of the iPD offerings.

Seeking out presenters was effortless. Staff and faculty, from all divisions stepped forward to lead workshops on things they do in the classroom and with students to support learning through the use of technology. These presenters helped to make iPD a huge success. Their preparation in designing and delivering the workshop experiences inspired the attendees to improve their own practices. From participant feedback, 93% of the faculty and staff responded that they learned something with 90% saying that they will apply what they learned. Faculty and staff members are recognizing the expertise within our own school and iPD has helped to build a community of learners. The success of this event could not have been possible without the involvement of numerous community members.

Reflections

iPD is about learning. And learn we did. The biggest piece of consistent feedback we received after the iPD event was that people want more of this type of professional development. iPD was a two hour event, but people are asking for two days next time. Teachers and staff would like more time built into the iPD schedule to allow for play and reflection on how this new learning will change teaching. Many people used time during PLC meetings after iPD to share what they learned with their colleagues.

Comments from iPD participants include:

It was BY FAR the BEST PD I think we have had. I was able to take what I had learned and use it that very morning. I am able to share it with my colleagues, and they are benefiting from it as well. THANK YOU for all of the hard work and preparation that went in to it. The presenters were well informed, passionate, and we were able to play and experiment and, therefore, to learn. AWESOME!  

iPD highlighted our own talented and amazing teachers, plus it was a great community building event. One suggestion - let's do it for a full day and celebrate with some wine and cheese at the end!

One per year. Most useful PD I've had at SAS in 9 years outside of doing my Masters in Education. Many thanks to the Tech Team.

It was a great use of time. The choice was amazing and speaks to the talent and professionalism of our faculty.

Excellent. Time well spent. Excellent learning experience. Please have more.

I'm already looking forward to the next iPD!

The learning did not just happen for the participants. In preparing for iPD, presenters learned through reflection on their practice. Presenters and participants alike appreciated getting to know about things happening outside their divisions. This comment from a presenter summarizes it best.

Presenting "blog commenting" really helped me be self reflective about what we are doing, which will feed back into better teaching of these skills. Also, it was great to be able to talk to the teachers who attended our session and get a better sense of what other teachers are doing school wide in this area. This was a great experience. 

As an Educational Technology Team, we learned by helping each other organize iPD and developing solutions for signing up and sending reminders. We also learned a lot about the teaching and learning happening across divisions. If you would like a peek into that teaching and learning, look at our complete list of sessions including links to resources.

Google+ HashTag Winners

Google+ is a new communication medium this year at SAS. The Google+ competition gave faculty and staff a reason to get posting on Google+ and also added an element of fun.

Here are our winners…

Best Selfie goes to Laura Schuster for this little gem. She got bonus Geek Points and quite a few +1s as well.

Winning the Most +1s and Interactions Prize  was Nancy Von Wahlde! This post got people talking. Not only did it have some great comments and +1s but it was also reshared by other people. Technology allows us to Communicate and Collaborate and this was a perfect post for that! Great job, Nancy and the entire crew in the pic!

Winning the Most Inspired Post was Kelly Mcfadzen! We loved that she was motivated by the learning from Jill Carpenter's session, even though she didn't attend.

Authors: Robyn Lynch, Dianna Pratt, and Heather Dowd

MS Photo Booth in the Capture Studio - Gong Xi Fa Cai

On January 24 the MS Library/Ed Tech team put the “Capture” design studio to use during our monthly MS breakfast.  Check out our photos!

The Capture Studio

Our Capture Studio is equipped with green, white and black screens as well as some photography lights.  The studio is available for teachers and students alike.  It is a cinch to set up.  All you need to do is turn on the lights, pull down the preferred screen and start snapping photos or shooting videos with your phone, ipad, or camera.

The Capture Studio tools work well for teacher directed projects, or individual student projects that might require a more professional look.  Additionally, the green screen allows for inserting a “fake” background later as is done in the following video to make it look like it was shot in Paris.

Our Library staff is happy to give a quick intro to the Capture Studio - just stop by.  We are excited to see our students and faculty come up with innovative uses for the Capture Studio tools.  

MS 1:1 Laptop Program Launch

Team Teaching - a learning symbiosis

Discussing what makes a good blog comment

Mr. Riley (grade 6 RLA) and I recently team taught a lesson on what makes a good quality blog comment. It was an interactive lesson which ended with students coming up with a list of what makes a comment a good comment. The student list included everything on our list. Students also made connections between the new idea of blog commenting and another process they had learned for providing feedback in RLA class. So, in effect, their list was even better than ours. If you are interested, see the mini-lesson below for details.

I had two big take-aways for the day. One - team teaching is a great thing. Mr. Riley sees the students every day. He knows them. He knows what they've learned and where they're going. I come in for one quick mini-lesson on blogging. I know where we want to go with blogging at our school. I can model the good blogging values we hope to foster in our new bloggers. But, Mr. Riley knows how to tie what I'm saying in with everything the students are doing. He knew to ask the right questions to call up prior knowledge from RLA class. Together we made accomplished the learning objective and we reinforced prior learning. It was a good partnership.

Two - Mr. Riley is not only a great teacher, he is a fantastic new blogger. In his new role as literacy coach, he has started blogging for the teachers he supports. As I stood in his classroom talking with students about the importance of commenting in blogging, I realized once again that I need to live up to what I say. I need to blog more often so that when I talk to teachers about how valuable public reflection on teaching and learning can be, I've got something to prove it. Thank you Mr. Riley.

Continuum of comments

Blog commenting mini-lesson

Before class

• Students read teacher blog posts and pick one to comment on. Write comment on sticky note and bring it to class.

In class

• Today’s goal
1. learn about the qualities of a good comment
2. Talk about importance of comments - That’s where the conversation happens!
3. One of the unique things about blogs is that bloggers are looking for comments.  They want to hear from their readers.
• Hand out real comments from the middle school blog and other classroom blogs to each pair of students.
• Students put comments on continuum on the floor. (String across the floor with markers for exemplary, meeting, approaching, below.)
• Walk through continuum and read comments.
• Do a think pair share on what makes a good comment.
1. write results on butcher paper
2. compare to commenting guidelines
• Students look at their sticky note comment and line up on the continuum where their comment should be.
• Revise comment and then go type comment on teacher blog.

A comment should add to the conversation.

SAS MS Demo Slam

In September, the Google Apps for Education Singapore Summit team hosted a Demo Slam where people took three minutes each to wow the audience with a new tool or idea. It was high energy fun and the perfect way to end a successful Google Summit.

This month, we decided to hold our own mini demo slam at the middle school faculty meeting to share some of our learning from the previous months. Nine teachers presented 60 second summaries of something they've found useful lately. Some are productivity tech tips and some are helpful teaching ideas. Feedback from other teachers is that it was interesting, helpful, fun, and they want more! Have a look through our slides to see the tools we presented. Don't miss 8th grade science teacher Bill Hoffman singing the praises of Flubaroo.

I'm not texting. I'm tweeting!

"I saw you texting during the keynote speech." A couple of teachers whispered this to me as if I had been naughty. I just smiled.

We had just listened to a fantastic opening session by Dr. Austin Buffum, an expert in the Professional Learning Community (PLC) process. Of course, to many people it did look like I was busily sending text messages to one of my friends. Of course, that is exactly not what I was doing. I was tweeting!

There is an important difference between texting and tweeting. Texting is a private message between two people. A tweet, on the other hand, is a public message that is broadcast out to whomever follows you and has an interest in what you are saying. You have 140 characters to get across a short, sweet point that is tweetworthy.

Many people do not yet see the point of tweeting. "Why would I care what someone eats, or if Ashton Kutcher is having coffee." I agree! For me, however, it is the most valuable professional development tool in my bag of tricks. Who you follow, what you contribute and the conversations that you have are the secrets to the effective use of Twitter.

The list of people I follow is mostly comprised of other educational technology coordinators, coaches, administrators and techy teachers. We all share something in common...the desire to share and a passion for good teaching. Most of us tweet out photos, quips, links, experiences, struggles and celebrations. These tweeps are my Personal Learning Network (PLN) and we all grow from what we share, even though most of us have never met.

So what was I doing during Dr. Buffum's opening address? I was having a rich conversation with other members of the audience who were also tweeting, such as Heather Dowd, Tim Stuart, Anthony Selley, Shaun Kirkwood, John Gaskell and Jemma Hooykaas. We shared the bits that resonated with us and recorded the experience as it happened. This is the way I take notes now during many conferences. Several more SAS faculty in the room were following along with what we were saying, lurking and learning. We used the #sasedu hashtag to tag our school-related tweets and #atplc when referring to PLCs.

Not only were people in the room learning from each other, there were thousands of other Twitter users reading what we were sharing. Kerri-Lee Beasley, a Digital Literacy Coach at UWC was following along. She tweeted:

The power of Twitter comes from the connections we make. It takes time to build up a good list of people to follow and you have to contribute to the conversation to get people to follow you. Once the ball starts rolling, however, it can be one of the most professionally rewarding things you can do.

If you really want to see what I was doing with my nose in my phone and my thumbs frantically tapping away? Check out my Storify round-up of the Twitter action from Day 1: http://storify.com/jayatwood/plc-institute-sas. The next time you see someone on their phone during a workshop ask them, "Were you tweeting?!"

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