July 12: Connecting to Students and Parents

Welcome back! I hope you enjoyed your first day of class and found some good ways to stay connected with other teachers. We did not get quite as far as intended because of the technology challenges, but we will keep working today on ways to remedy that.

Today we are going to be looking at ways to connect our students. Let's be honest: they're already connected with each other, so the challenge as teachers is how we can use those connections to help them learn.

http://engaging21stcstudents.wikispaces.com/Day+02

• Review of Google: how to use it and some of what it does
• Collaboration in the classroom
• Reading 1: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants
• Introduce and use PADLET to share ideas as you read
• Video on using Google docs in the classroom
• Explore some of the resources and sign up for Edmodo if you haven't already
• CHALLENGE: Blog post: How does collaboration help students?
• Plan a collaborative lesson in google docs
• Group chat: What is your school's policy towards student devices?
• Reading 2: Are you Listening to Me? Jigsaw activity (each group presents the information and summarizes for the class)
• Use Google Drive to create a collaborative lesson

July 11: Class Introduction

Welcome to our class! We are going to be spending our time considering how students learn in the 21st century and how we can capitalize on technology to incite student learning. This means working with students' passions instead of against them, connecting ourselves with other educators, and taking advantage of the huge variety of free resources suddenly available at our fingertips!

This blog will contain a day by day syllabus and summary of each day's events. The resources for this class will be hosted on Wikispaces at:

http://engaging21stcstudents.wikispaces.com/

There will be many resources listed on the Wiki -- perhaps an overwhelming amount. Please browse through them as time permits. Each day, I will direct your attention to a specific few!

DAY ONE:

Today we will be creating blogs and exploring resources together as we prepare for two weeks of learning and exploration. The outline for today's class is as follows:

• Introduction and discussion of class expectations
• Review of course syllabus
• Introduction of class wiki and blogs
• Introduction to Google: create accounts for those who don't have one
• Today's reading: Modernizing Career and Technical Education Programs 
• Small group discussion 1
• Summary: Presentation of your group's main ideas in Google Slides
• Challenge #1: Create a personal blog
• Introduction of 3D Gamelab
• Use 3D Gamelab to explore methods of connecting with other educators
• Challenge #2: Create connections with other educators and/or explore methods of continued professional learning
• Small group discussion 2
• Presentation of discoveries
• Explore classroom resources: Connected Educators and Online Learning

Extension activity, as time permits or to complete on own: Video on time to learn, Pinterest exploration, and setting up of boards, blog reflections