Vision 2015 in Action

Heading into the fourth year of Vision 2015 (2013-14), Columbus Academy faculty reported the following:

1. Increased classroom engagement

2. Greater student ownership of learning

3. Confidence from teaching others

4. Learning in a way the matches the individual’s learning style and needs

5. An enormous jump in one-on-one time with students

6. A remarkable increase in performance on tests

See below for some of the exciting ways we're seeing Vision 2015 applied at Columbus Academy.

Redundant Resource:

In a redundant resource, everything that happens in the classroom is recorded and made available online. This includes handouts, practice exams, and lectures.

The video below shows an excerpt from an Upper School Math redundant resource.

Redundant resources offer a number of benefits:

1. Students who miss a class can access the material for that day.

2. Students can go back to review material they found to be difficult. They can pause and rewind the lectures.

3. Students can audit courses in which they were not enrolled.

4. Substitute and new teachers can use the resource to stay one day ahead of the students.

5. Parents can use the resource as well.

With redundant resources becoming more commonplace, we've noticed teachers starting to collaborate with their peers more. In many cases, teachers across sections of the same course share their redundant resources.

Teachers have also started to unhook from their class lectures and rethink their class time. In some cases they've introduced components of the flipped-classroom, asking students to watch the recorded instruction at home so they can do their work while at school.

Teachers have expanded upon their redundant resources to provide access to things they do not do in the classroom. For example: teachers who only had time in class to work through several practice test problems might provide online video instruction of themselves working through all the problems.

The picture below shows a 3^rd Grade handout with a QR code. The teacher hand wrote the handout to make it less intimidating but included a QR code to a video of the lesson that went with this handout. This allowed students to view the instruction again and parents to better partner with the teacher from home.

24/7 Reflective Engagement:

Faculty have started making their online resources reflective using tools like online discussion forums and Edmodo. In the project shown below, students were asked to design their own experiments demonstrating velocity. They were then asked to upload their work and a picture or video to an online forum, where classmates would then view the experiment and share their own thoughts about the project.

Some teachers extend classroom discussions using collaborative tools like VoiceThread, a tool that allows teachers to upload a video or image and students to leave comments. Doing this they were able to engage a whole new set of students who didn’t as readily engage in a synchronous classroom discussion.

Below is an example of a Middle School Language Arts VoiceThread.

The classroom twitter feed also gave this teacher a number of opportunities to talk about good digital citizenship. That’s a conversation we want to happen from pre-k through twelve. The teacher spent a lot of time talking about what is safe to put online and does the class really know with whom they’re communicating. In the first year of the project, one of the first grade students tweeted “You’re weird” to a buddy who was tweeting at the same time across the room. That tweet of course went out to all the class twitter followers. That tweet provided an opportunity for the teacher to pull the class together and ask them how they thought their followers might have felt when the student tweeted to them all that they were weird.

iPad One-to-One Mobile Learning Program:

The introduction of the iPad, has led to many innovations in regards to teaching and learning. We have found the iPad lends itself to this because of its versatility, its intuitive interface, and because it is “tech light”, meaning students and faculty don’t have to learn how to use it, they just use it. In the past, if a student wanted to conduct an interview, they would check out a Flipcam from the library; conduct the interview; import the recorded video into iMovie, export the movie to DVD, then play it on a computer that they had plugged into a projector. With the iPad, they simply record the interview on the iPad and then walk into their classroom and with the click of a button the interview can be played on the projector through the classroom Apple TV.

While we view the iPad as the enabling device at this time, we have to be flexible enough to consider tech tools in the future that might be even "tech lighter".

You’ll notice in the images below, the iPad becomes just another tool on the desk. It can be used in a variety of ways, for a variety of purposes, and it largely stays out of the way of the other things happening in the classroom.

Below is a picture of student handwriting on the iPad.

One innovation we've seen as a result of the iPad Mobile Learning program is the introduction of something we call “quick checks”. Quick checks are where students move at their own pace on projects but before moving onto the next project, they must get up in front of the class and teach a quick (15 second) lesson on what they just learned. The nice thing about this is that students then get to hear short lessons about a topic taught in eighteen different ways by eighteen different teachers.

We have seen innovations using the iPad across grade levels and subject areas. The picture on the right shows a student applying makeup in a Creative Expressions class. In the past he would have used a mirror but using the iPad’s built-in camera the iPad became his mirror. By using the iPads as their mirrors, students were then able to snap photos with the click of a button. And since they were snapping photos at various points while applying their makeup, students could then create a video flip book of their makeup being applied and narrate the video explaining the process.