Evidence and Reflection
March 2019 - Success Update!
Objective
Over the course of the 18/19 academic year, we will encourage and train our teachers to grow in their confidence of Google Apps and open their minds to an environment of professional learning.
Evidence - Projects
In November, 6th Grade Students shared their Hero's Journey projects with parents and other visitors. All work was created within a Google Slide template. By creating such a cool project that looks good, the students built confidence in their skills. All laptops/iPads/Computers were accompanied by a form where students could let the author know what they thought of the work. Overall, student confidence grew as students shared their writing and Google expertise.
Evidence - SIP Team & Computational thinking
To carry out our School Improvement Team (SIP) indicator A2.04 which states: Instructional Teams develop standards-aligned units of instruction for each subject and grade level, our teachers will be uploading Computational Thinking lessons into a Google Classroom created for this purpose by SIP. Teachers will use this Google Classroom environment 3 times throughout the year to obtain and complete the SIP task. This is an efficient way of achieving the SIP objective that also models use of Google Classroom and provides repeated practice in this environment for teachers to help grow confidence and experience with Google Classroom.
Evidence - Professional Learning Days
In November, we planned with our Digital Learning Coordinators, Katherine Haywood and Wanda Hanley, to have two days of learning during planning periods. On February 7 and 21st, we had good turnout and decided to add one more day for a sandbox workday, March 21st.
Barb - Google Drive and Calendars
Katie - Google Forms for Differentiated Instruction
Mary Clay - FlipGrid
Wanda - Discovery Ed
Dr. Cooper - Digital Lockboxes
One on One Help
Departmental Help
Tweets!
Evidence & Reflection
Many of our teachers have grown in a positive way through our workdays. They arrived skeptical, but were welcomed by our DLCs and Faculty who were leading courses and opened up to trying new tools to use in their classrooms. After the February sessions, the comments requested more time for working.
Comments from our survey:
"I appreciate the flexibility this year's PD offered. No new suggestions at this time. Continue in this direction."
"I really liked the two days to learn and the one day to work individually on what we learned."
"Make this required so people have to come. It is such a good learning opportunity and people ask for this stuff outside of the PD because they don't know how to do it. This way they will get credit for it. "
This is why we created a third workday with a Sandbox Experience. Overall, teachers earned 125 hours of CEU credits.
The real question now, how can we keep this growth mindset into the future? A May 8th survey helped us with the planning, we will work with the administration to make it a priority!
Big thanks to our Digital Learning coordinators and other DLC's:
Wanda Hanley and Katie Heywood - supportive and committed to success!
Mary Clay Vick and Barbara Vinal - guest superstars!