First meeting of Year Two at DYPrep

Teachers sharing Blogger skills and ideas

 
Yesterday we had our first meeting of Year Two at DYPrep. (YEAH!!) We had a great turn out with four returning mentor educators and five new educators. Rudy, our Digital Learning Director at DYPrep, led the meeting and helped us cover a lot of ground. 

This was the agenda: 

1. Welcome back - Brief statement describing how you are feeling about the portfolio project? 
2. Parsons - Welcome Jess Walker
3. Google Classroom - What is it? (Emily)  
   Join the class if you haven’t done so already
   Assignment #1: Copy and paste the link to your blog to the shared Google Document
4.  Blog Share Outs - What’d you learn? What are some questions?
5.  Student Posts - Discuss:
   Criteria of a “good post”
   Different types of posts: reflective, in process, final product, inspiration/research, etc
   Drafting Process
   Life Ready Task Connections
6. Geeking Out - Play time. Go on blogger and do the following tasks
   Create your class blog using blogger.google.com
   Explore: Creating a post, adding images, embed videos, tagging and linking
7. Computer / Device Usage 
8. Future Meeting Dates/Time

Rudy presents to the group about Classroom

Overall, the educators are feeling a mix of excitement to start engaging their students with new tools and practices, but also nervous about trying something new when time is tight. All the educators are at very different places with blogging and so we told them all that matters is pushing yourself to whatever your next step is. 

A couple of great things that happened during the meeting where: 

1. Rudy ran the class like he would a tech class - he introduced language he uses as cues like "45" for closing the laptops half way to focus or "Access" which means to open your Google accounts. This is helpful because some of our teachers haven't taught as often with technology in the classroom. If teachers share common practices across the school, the students will hopefully pick up on the cues more quickly.
2. Rudy and Emily introduced everyone to Google Classroom. Emily is using it in her classes and so far it's going well. She's basically using her Classroom hub as her "class blog" where she sends out assignments and shares resources. We talked about how the first year teachers should still create class blogs using Blogger, but maybe next year everyone would move to Classroom if it works better. It seems like a great tool! 
3. Rudy also leveraged the expertise of the mentor educators really well. He asked them to get up and help the other educators several times in the meeting which built a spirit of cooperation and support in the room.

Jessica A's blog for Global

We spent some time looking at some of the educators' blogs which inspired a lot of conversation about what is possible. Jessica Altounian especially inspired folks by showing her own class blog and her own digital portfolio from grad school. It was great to see that we are teaching high school students skills that are currently  required in grad school programs. 

One thing that several educators were confused about was the embedding of documents using Scribd. They understood basically what it did, but they weren't sure why when you pressed the "translate" widget (which is a feature everyone was excited about!) it didn't also translate the embedded document. We worked through it and some people came up with some work arounds, like linking to a Google Doc with the text copy and pasted so folks can translate it. 


We also discussed what it might look like if all students starting in 9th grade were beginning with portfolios. Rudy tied that idea into the bigger plan for the school to use more portfolios and to make students "life-ready". I think we all know that every student making digital portfolios and keeping an organized Google Drive archive of all their work is a ways off but everyone seemed to be on board.  

Excerpt from a student lab post in Emily's class

We then had a discussion about different kinds of posts students can write and also what makes a good post. One group said that it wasn't enough to just have text but students should be able to connect their text to multimedia like memes, videos, or even audio. In addition, Emily talked a lot about her own class and how she wants her students' posts to go deeper this year. She wants to move beyond quick responses to prompts. She showed an example of a post a student had posted that day that documented a lab they had been working on. She was glad to see that her students rose to the challenge - writing up everything they had done and also including photos of charts. (see image to the right) Moving forward, she wants the students to not just post their labs but write about what they learned from their lab - more like a reflection on their learning and their take aways. A new educator - Gerry - also had some great ideas about how to connect blogging to his Math class, including using the blog for life ready tasks and connecting to fields like urban planning or landscape architecture. 

We used the last part of the meeting to log onto Blogger and make sure everyone had at least created a blog. Educators and support staff worked together to help one another get to their next step including adding labels and widgets. We had about 25 minutes to work on the computers, but we can always use more of that lab time! As the meetings move on we will probably have more time it. Rudy's new lab room where me meet is great, but now with the bigger room it gets loud quickly and can feel a bit chaotic. Mika - one of the educators - asked me about pairing up the educators in future meetings and I think we might work on how we do that. It would be great to have the mentor educators paired up with one or two new educators to share their expertise and maybe also learn new ways of thinking about blogs from the new folks. We might also eventually have to break out into two rooms or even into the hallway to find the space to focus. So much to do ... so little time!

We wrapped up the session with some talk about scheduling computer time and future meetings - both big challenges, but we will figure it out. All in all the group is ready to run with this project - knowing there will be some hurdles along the way. Looking forward to what comes of the creativity and perseverance of the DY educators and students this year!