Schools to Visit During this Rotation
During rotation 6, I'll be scheduling large portions of days at the following buildings:
- Dearborn Heights Campus
- McCullough-Unis
- Edsel Ford High School
- Oakman Elementary
- Smith Middle School
I'll also be spending portions of my days at Woodworth and Bryant during the current rotation.
Coaches' Corner
During this rotation, Amy Gwizdz and I will be conducting 2 Coaches' Corner sessions on the following topics:
- Promethean board and ActivInspire
- TBD
Mahara Implementation
Show teachers and support staff how to use Mahara and discuss the best practices and educational theory behind using ePortfolios in K-12 education.
Introducing Oakman Staff to Mahara
At the request of Principal Radewin Awada, Amy Gwizdz, Chris Kenniburg, and I presented in an all-day PD to Oakman Elementary Staff. Teachers and support staff learned about the theory behind ePortfolios in K-12 education, and then learned how to construct portfolios for themselves so they can, in turn, guide students in the same.
Mahara's Rolling
During the past week, I've had the pleasure to work with several teachers to introduce them to Mahara. As I spend time preparing to present the concept to them, I am struck by the power of the tool and the educational experiences it opens up for students. Admittedly, Mahara is not easy to use, much less is it intuitive. Yet the benefits for students far outweigh the costs.
As we continue to introduce teachers to Mahara, there we have become aware of some needs that have emerged. One of these needs is for an outline of a general workflow for teachers to get students started. As we presented to the staff at Oakman this past week, it became obvious that clicking back and forth, into and out of edit mode on a page edit screen was created a much less desirable experience for teachers. As Chris Kenniburg suggested, it is perhaps easier for teachers and students to focus first on uploading materials, then on the creation of a page once everything is uploaded. This requires a little bit of prior planning of the page, and at some points it may not work best since a page's construction and the need for materials does not necessarily follow a linear timeline. But in general, this seems like the best course of action--especially as we issue recommendations for teachers who are just getting started.
Mahara ePortfolio Project for 7th Grade Science at Woodworth
After gathering materials from Nicole Laramee, I will be designing an activity that students will do to learn about geologic time in 7th grade science. This assignment module on iLearn will incorporate all of the necessary materials for students, including links, assignment sheets, and rubrics.
Discuss materials shared through Google Drive, quizzes, and what's coming up in her classes.
After designing the project, meet with Nicole Laramee to discuss the details and implementation of the activity/project.
MAISA Unit 2 for LA 4 at Edsel Ford
Plans for integrating technology into the English Language Arts courses at Edsel Ford.
See attachments shared via Google Drive
Using Moodle in 5th grade
Plan for helping Rola Harb (McU) to integrate Moodle into instructional experiences.
Convert quizzes from PDF for use in Moodle.
Develop a lesson to teach cells and cell parts that integrates Moodle, Google Drive, Google Drawings, and YouTube to model technology integration
Model teaching using Moodle modules