BLC18

What does “innovative” mean? Teachers who are labeled as “risk takers” and sometimes even ostracized by others in their own school learn a ton from their students’ failures and successes as they try new ideas. This session will expose you to lessons teachers have learned from their students. Depending on group size and participation, we’ll work through up to ten lessons, and you and your students will benefit from them when you get back to school.

Data shows kids of color are not thriving in our educational system, why is that and how do we fix it? In this workshop we will explore how the myth of meritocracy shows up in the curriculum of our classrooms leaving students of color and their history of resistance to oppression out of the story. We will identify strategies found in new research that empowers students to challenge the single story being told in our curriculum. We will use the lens of indigenous people and the invisibility of their full story and its impact on their descendants.

Ormiston Junior College is a place where students build Authentic Inquiry Projects instead of subjects, this work culminates with students pitching for their own grades with peers and teachers providing feedback and group assessing for the learner. This workshop will discuss, share and reimagine what authentic learning could be. We will be sharing a process for building authenticity so that it becomes possible for all learners to gain success.

Picture a fifth grader who has identified animals as one of her passions. She has chosen to work on the problem of endangered species and make recommendations for improving the situation. Monday morning starts off with a Skype conference call with an NGO in Brazil that will share some important information about deforestation of the Amazon.

After she finishes the call, the student and her team write down action steps and divide the tasks based on each member’s interest and expertise. They have two weeks until the next call and before then have two scheduled team meetings and a full-day lab session to work on this project with an expert in the field.

This vision is possible! This session will present concrete ways to harness expertise to dramatically enhance engagement and understanding for students. Examples will be given for early elementary though high school.

Sometimes when we get learners to choose, they pick the first option, the easy option, or the solution that they know will work. How can we encourage learners to explore dangerous options: ones they may well fail at? We look at ideation, passion and the role of mentors for this process in a case study at Santa Maria College, Western Australia.

Presenter will provide highlights from his career as an educational technologist with a psychology background and a commitment to emotionally intelligent communities and schools, culminating in the development of an online learning platform for the RULER approach to social emotional learning.

Stronger natural disasters, the rise of international terrorism, a polarized populace – the question for our generation of teachers is, “How do we prepare young people to tackle problems we currently don’t know how to solve?” In an increasingly complicated world, we need to honor the research-rich past and harness children’s natural curiosity as we look to the future. School transformation requires collaboration at the highest levels to ensure everyone is rowing into the unknown in the same direction. Participants will find out how we can work together to prepare students to tackle complex problems with deep, conceptual understanding.

Educators acknowledge that the 21st Century requires us to do schooling differently, but how do we prepare young people for the unknown while still meeting our required learning standards and benchmarks? Many teachers and leaders fell there is “no time” for real-world transfer of learning. But structured properly and collaboratively, we can do it!

When learning is focused at the conceptual level, students can make natural connections between the disciplines and work together to solve complex problems. And teachers and students can select a focus problem or project of their choice while still hitting the required learning outcomes. This session will demonstrate a protocol that leaders can use to help staff come to consensus on a common vision and purpose to gain buy-in and collective efficacy. Next, participants will experience a shared process for creating interdisciplinary projects. Finally, they will model a peer coaching protocol for refining project plans and supports.

Outcomes:
• Contribute to a vision and common purpose for school transformation
• Use a shared process for creating a standards-aligned, interdisciplinary project
• Try out a peer coaching protocol for refining project plans and supports

Authors on Call, a division of iNK Think Tank has been pioneering a hi-tech version of an "author-in-residence program" using interactive videoconferencing and a wiki to unpack the creative process so students can create their own. iNK is a nonprofit and we should have completed a number of these projects, funded by grants, for Title I schools by the time of the conference. We have already done some of the programs with transformative results. Andrea Warren, award-winning author of Orphan Train Rider, will join Vicki on screen in the iNK Zoom room to contribute her experiences in this method of reaching students with interactive videoconferencing. 

Homelessness is a worldwide problem and everyone struggles with finding a solution. We asked our students to come up with an idea meant to build awareness and empathy. One of the hardest things for students is to understand what it means to live a life other than their own.

Join us in a hands-on, thought provoking, engaging conversation about a worldwide issue that relates to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This student-created project about homelessness can be easily adapted for any grade level and assists your students in understanding what it means to be without a home.

It’s an exciting time for teaching and learning math! Come join the math revolution and transform the culture of math at your school! This session will explore how students of all grade levels can master both content standards and mathematical practices, so that they can apply math authentically to solve real-world problems. In order to be future-ready, students must have a conceptual understanding of math, and be able to explain their thinking orally, with models, through drawings, and in writing. Simply getting the right answer is not enough! Students need to find and justify multiple solutions, using a variety of problem-solving strategies. This can be achieved through rich mathematical tasks. Rich Tasks are open-ended problems, inspired by the United Nations Global Goals for Sustainable Development, and provide an opportunity to raise awareness of key issues, as well as support students in finding solutions that will have a positive impact on the world.

Participants will have an opportunity to:

Create Mathematical Beliefs & Expectations; these values will become the foundation of your math workshop, and will promote a culture which values deep thinking, growth mindset, and problem-solving

Understand how Mathematical Practices and Skills of Understanding help students master and apply content in meaningful ways
Incorporate Making Thinking Visible routines to support students in thinking critically

Explore ways to integrate technology into the math classroom, for both creating and sharing content

Learn how to facilitate a Number Talk and a Digital Bansho to allow students to see connections between various strategies, and to ask guiding questions and provide feedback to their peers

See examples of Rich Tasks aligned to the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development, and create your own

Develop a Professional Learning Plan so you can share what you've learned with your school community

Let’s work together to transform the culture of math, and teach students how to apply mathematical learning to solve real problems, both locally and globally.

The 2017 Horizon report acknowledges that significant challenges in implementing technology adoption in k-12 education is a lack of authentic learning experiences.

“STEM education refers to a cross-disciplinary approach to teaching that increases student interest in STEM related fields and improves students’ problem solving and critical analysis skills.” (National STEM School Education Council Strategy, 2015)

This presentation will discuss the benefits of authentic learning tasks and how Knox Grammar School is using Integrated Learning Tasks (ILAs) and STEAM, to provide students with an opportunity to see the synergy that exists between subjects and to realise their interconnectedness to real life experiences.

We will dive deep into the development and implementation of our Mission to Mars project, where teams developed a Mars sustainable colony. Areas of interest that will be covered include:

Why ILAs and STEM are a perfect fit
NASA video conference interactive session from the Johnson Space Centre
Integration of Mathematics, Science, English Technology (Scratch coding) and Language tasks into the project
Submission of a Mars Mission Entrance Exam (M.E.E.)
Building of the environment using Minecraft
Submission of a 3-minute video walk through of their completed environment. Click link for example of completed task https://youtu.be/Ya9Qlrct71g


Teachers will leave this session with all the resources required to complete or adapt the project for their school. Please note, Minecraft was not mandated for this task, it can ba adapted to other means of presenting your final product

The presentation will also focus briefly on a Year 9 Biomechanics STEM ILA and a Year 7 United Nations Sustainability ILA.

Citizen science provides an authentic, project-based outlet for students to engage in hands-on scientific research. With “citizen engineering”, students become involved in a design thinking process to engineer and develop solutions to real world problems. This session explores how students can build low-tech devices (plankton nets) and high-tech devices (Internet-connected buoys) to contribute to citizen science initiatives.

Many of us only know of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning through pop culture and SciFi movies, although it's already all around us. A recent Forbes article talked about the shift that will occur when Machine Learning and AI take over processing mundane and repetitive tasks and require humans to perform high-value tasks that require strategic thinking, creativity, and ethics. This is a version a student co-presentation at New York Academy of Medicine and SXSWEdu with student voice representing perspective from Generation Z and experts in the AI industry. The goal of education needs to shift to prepare for an unknown workforce by educating students to assess in multiple modalities, transfer learning outside of purely learning content, and knowing how to adapt various situations.

There is a lot of talk about coding and robotics in education, but why would you want to use them in your elementary classroom? Are you curious about what is possible? We’ll talk about the “why’s” and the “how’s” of using this new pedagogy in ways that support and extend your
curriculum along with practical examples of its use in classrooms.

We’ll be exploring teacher fears and uncertainties that arise when the words “genius hour,” “passion project,” or “20% time” are discussed. How DO teachers offer this time to students to pursue their own interests? Participants will share their fears and hurdles, and then discuss non-negotiables to make this time effective. If time, we’ll create a flowchart of how to navigate this valuable time in class.

With the introduction of a new course, The Science of Archaeology, Lauralton Hall embarked on an amazing adventure into place-based education this year combining both scientific skills and interest in local history. Leveraging the campus’ status as a national historic landmark, students learned how to interpret historical (primary) resources, identify sites of interest on campus, and conduct an authentic archaeological dig using protocols set out by the state office of archaeology. In this presentation, April Kelley will describe the archaeology program, its relation to NGSS, and how you can use the lessons she learned to create your own place-based experience unique to your school and community.
Place-based education has been defined as “anytime, anywhere, learning that leverages the power of place, and not just the power of technology, to personalize learning” (Getting Smart, 2017). What makes place-based education so powerful and motivating is that it can be done literally anywhere – from the most rural areas to the most urban and any place in between. They keys to a successful place-based learning experience are its authenticity and its ability to fully engage learners.

Parents and teachers complaining kids are always on their phones?
Do we need to get kids to create on their devices and not consume?
Kids don't know how to communicate anymore - is this the common complaint of 21st Century kids?
We know we need to get kids to create and not just consume technology, but how do we do this with no support from stakeholders? In this workshop we will move the discussion from perceptions to reality as we explore the changing paradigm of our learning cultures in the 21st Century. Our face-to-face world is blending quickly with the digital realm, we need to understand the belief systems that exist within this digital realm and create new norms of behavior and expectations to support them.

In this session I will describe a pilot in which AI-based software was used to provide rapid feedback to student writing in a variety of college courses.