Instructor: Jenn Hornyak

Explore the exciting and ever-changing world of Google Apps for EDU (also called GSuite for Education! In this course, you will learn about a variety of Google tools that can help increase student engagement as well as increase collaboration, creativity and productivity. The course will ask participants to learn how to use many Google Apps. Teachers will leave this course with an action plan for how they plan to incorporate these tools or enhance their current use of these tools into their classrooms.

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Instructor: Timothy Brown, M.S.Ed.

Participants will explore internet resources, cyber-bullying prevention and ethical standards for digital citizens. Participants will explore best available resources for keeping students safe as well as how to create an Internet Safety Policy. Topics to be discussed include plagiarism, copyrights, cyber bullying, online etiquette, cyber safety and security.

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Instructor: Erin Brown

Course Description: (This course can be used for initial and re-certification credit.)

This course is designed to assist teachers in selecting and evaluating materials for teaching reading and related skills that are consistent with the findings of scientifically based reading research. Teachers should leave this course with an understanding of research-supported programs, approaches, and methods, so that they can address different levels of reading proficiency within the classroom and enable students to become strategic, fluent, and independent readers. Participants will use a variety of texts and other materials to promote student independent reading. Participants will be prepared to involve parents and members of the school and surrounding community to promote daily reading inside and outside of school.

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Instructor: Janessa Stancato

Course Description:

This course is designed to provide classroom teachers the research-based best practices, techniques and strategies in working with highly abled students. Learners will explore how observation, interpretation, and evaluation result in effective, efficient instructional planning for highly abled students and the ideas and techniques in the book will transform the school experiences for all students.

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(Different course number than Session 1, Digital Tools)

Instructor: Vicky McCann

Course Description: Feel like you need more tools for your educator “toolbox”? Don’t ever seem to have time to learn about all the great tools out there? Want to create a more engaging classroom environment for your students? In this course, we will explore a variety of digital tools that can be used to engage your students through both instruction and assessment. You will leave this course having created lessons and assessments for personal use in your own classroom using a variety of new educational technology tools.

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Instructor: Erin Brown

Course Description: (This course can be used for initial and re-certification credit.)

Participants will explore how to implement a cohesive literacy program that supports content area learning and literacy. This course will focus on the use of effective instructional methods and materials in the design of reading programs to meet the diverse needs and backgrounds of today’s learners. This course will explore the use of technology, writing strategies and learning experiences to promote independence in content area reading.

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Instructor: Julia Rogers

Course Description: (This course can be used for initial and re-certification credit.)

This course explores an instructional approach for teaching literacy skills: speaking, reading, spelling, and writing. It also addresses fluency, comprehension, orthographic knowledge, and writing from an emergent to advanced level. Students examine how observation, documentation, interpretation, evaluation, and planning result in appropriate instruction based on children’s strengths and needs. The course also focuses on the process of language development, including the impact of phonemic awareness and how the brain responds to reading acquisition.

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Instructor: Brian Buckner, M.Ed.

Course Description: Unlike instructional objectives, which are about instruction, derived from content standards, written in teacher language, and used to guide teaching during a lesson or across a series of lessons, learning targets frame a lesson from the student point of view. Through this course you will learn how to construct objective guided learning targets, how to “unpack” the targets, and how to assess that the targets were met. Students will leave this course with lessons that can be immediately used in their own course of instruction.

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Instructor:  Christina Buckner, MA

Course Description: In today's 21 st  century classroom, technology is not only readily available but its use is implied as the current industry standard.  Both students and teachers are bringing their handheld devices to the classrooms and have access to the web at their fingertips.  Teachers are expanding their classroom to include the internet, technology and media in all formats.  This class is designed for teachers of all grade levels and content areas to learn different ways to bring technology into their STEM classes through grading procedures, presentations, social media, apps, and online assessments.   Participants in the class will investigate methods of integrating technology as well as make decisions about when using technology would work and when it won't in their own environment and setting.

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Instructor: Maggie Hubbard, Ed.D.

Course Description:

In this course the participants will build both a conceptual and a practical understanding differentiated instruction (DI). Characteristics and key elements of differentiated instruction will be explored as well as beliefs that guide the DI model. Participants will analyze how differentiated classrooms differ from traditional classrooms as well as engage in various learning activities through which they will learn about teaching strategies designed so that students of different abilities, interest or learning needs will have equal access to the curriculum. Specifically, participants will examine how to differentiating instruction by varying content, process, and product through strategies such as tiering, compacting, and choice among others. Challenges to adopting DI will also be discussed.

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Instructor: Ellie Tehan, M.Ed.

Course Description: According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, jobs in STEM careers are expected to increase by approximately 1 million jobs from 2012 to 2022. This staggering increase shows that our students will need to be prepared in these subjects in order to be successful in our current society.

This course will address the importance of STEM education in elementary and middle school, as well as practical ways to create effective lessons that address your standards and engage students simultaneously.

This course will be entirely online and you will not be required to attend a live session at a particular time, so you will be able to complete the assignments at the time of day that works best for you. Optional office hours will be hosted, so if you have any questions or would like to discuss an assignment, I am available!

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Instructor: Kim McLean

As technology becomes more readily available, teachers must face a new challenge of implementing technology into their classroom. How can this be done in a math class?  This course is designed to introduce teachers to a few online applications that are favorites in mathematics classrooms. Create some new lessons/activities that you can use to check the level of understanding of our mathematical learners.

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Instructor: Eric Watts, Ph.D.,

Course Description: Disciplinary thinking represents the most advanced way of approaching and investigating issues within the various domains of knowledge (Gardner & Boix-Mansilla, 2006). Disciplines, such as history and other social sciences, have their own modes of inquiry, networks of concepts and principles, theoretical frameworks, symbolic systems, vocabularies, and modes of self-regulation (Levesque, 2008). Leaning on the works of Sam Wineburg, Bruce Van Sledright, Keith Barton, Linda Levstik, and other notable Social Studies educators, we will investigate the modes of inquiry and theoretical frameworks that are specific to the study of history. With a strong understanding of the discipline, participants will develop strategies to integrate historical thinking into their lessons and courses.

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Instructor: Shannon Norris

Current trends have shown a steady move toward cloud computing. Google Apps for Education is a suite of free, secure tools that can be used for collaboration and communication. With Google Apps for Education everything is automatically saved in the cloud. This allows users to access and edit email, documents, calendars and sites almost anywhere and anytime. Over 40 million students, faculty and staff in schools around the world are using Google Apps for Education. This course will allow teachers to effectively use Google Classroom and G Suite applications in effective ways.

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