District Tech Committee Members Recommend 4 Cs Strategies

Members of the District Technology Committee were recently asked to share a teaching and/or learning tactic, tip, recommendation, or resource in one or more of the "4 Cs:" Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and/or Critical Thinking. We highlight two teachers with ideas in the areas of Communication, Creativity, and Critical Thinking.

K–5 STEM Teacher at Roslyn Road and Hough School Becky McDowell has recently started using the online system Seesaw for STEM to share and document learning and ideas to encourage Communication. According to Seesaw, “Teachers find or create activities to share with students. Students take pics, draw, record videos, and more to capture learning in a portfolio. Families see their child’s work and leave comments and encouragement.”

Becky adds, “This app is great for communication because it allows multiple ways for students to share their ideas—text, pictures with caption, drawings, audio, and video! Plus, parents can see and comment on student work, and I can directly comment them as well.”

Barrington High Teacher Librarian Jennifer Walsh shared a great example of Creativity and Critical Thinking in her description of “Speed Book Dating.” When students engage in speed book dating, the room is set up with 5-6 genre tables with 10-12 books at each table. Students spend 5 minutes at each table with various tasks to complete on a timed schedule:

• Minute 1: look at covers, read backs.
• Minutes 2-3: choose 1 or 2 books and read book jacket blurb
• Minutes 3-5: choose 1 book, and begin reading the first few pages of the book

Speed Book Dating allows students to discover new books that match existing interests or spark new ones. They also learn strategies to quickly evaluate many aspects of a printed source.

Recent Comcast Network Outages

Since early December 2018, Barrington 220 has experienced a fair number of brief network outages related to Comcast service interruptions. While each of the outages have been brief in nature, about 5 minutes each in length, they are quite disruptive to our teaching and learning environment in the One to World infrastructure that we carefully crafted. While some of our school buildings have not been impacted, the majority have.

We have been in constant contact with Comcast teams from the very start, pressuring them to find the cause of the outages and then quickly implementing resolutions. At one time, Comcast had a reported 40 staff members working on one of the issues that was causing our outages. The Comcast engineers found and corrected a problem related to the routing of network traffic between two brands of network routers.

Two brief outages took place during the first week of February 2019, one during the school day and one after school hours. These outages were caused by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on other Comcast customers using the same Comcast network on which our systems run. DDoS attacks are hard to mitigate and increasingly common. 

(As a side note, there is a curious relationship to DDoS attacks and the online gaming that has helped give rise to DDoS attackers that sell their nefarious and illegal services. Security expert and blogger Brian Krebs writes extensively about this.)

While I cannot assure you that we have seen the last of these outages, we continue to work with Comcast and expect that they will soon bring us some good news concerning a full resolution for these ongoing outages.

Are Twitter Chats Worth Your Time?

Have you ever heard the expression "the smartest person in the room is the room?" It's an effective reminder that collective wisdom is often better than trying to figure out things for yourself. What if your room was full of thousands of educators from all parts of the country who have the same interests, questions, and struggles that you do?

Welcome to the world to Twitter chats. For a teacher looking to expand their professional network beyond the teachers in their buildings, a Twitter chat may be the perfect professional development opportunity. A Twitter chat uses a hashtag to conduct a planned, public Twitter conversation on a specific topic. Twitter chats are usually held for a finite length of time on a regular basis. These conversations are free to participate in and offer unrivaled access to other educators around the country. Twitter chats can be on general or specific topics.

There are hundreds of education-related Twitter chats for your to participation. Each Twitter chat has its own unique attributes related to number of participants, experience of moderators, specificity of topic, etc., so be patient when trying to find ones that fit you. Below, I have listed some Twitter chats that are a good place to start. However, if you have a specific topic that is of interest to you, try simply typing your topic into the search bar and see what appears!

Here are a few popular education-related Twitter chats to get you started (from ISTE.org) :

#edchat (Thursdays, 6 p.m.)
One of the first education chats, this popular chat has nine moderators and covers a broad range of topics.

#engchat (Monday, 6 p.m.)
Where English teachers share ideas, resources and inspiration.

#nt2t (Saturdays, 8 a.m.)
For educators who are new to Twitter.

#kinderchat (Mondays, 8 p.m.)

For anyone interested in kindergarten and early-childhood education.

#mschat (Thursdays at 7 p.m.) 

For middle school teachers.

#AppleEDUchat (Tuesdays, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.)

For all educators, led by Apple Distinguished Educators.

#EdTechChat (Mondays, 7 p.m.) 

Focused on topics related to edtech.

#iteachphysics (Saturdays, 8 a.m.) 

Bi-weekly chat for physics teachers.

#pblchat (Tuesdays, 8 p.m.) 

For project-based learning fans.

#Read4fun (Every other Sunday, 6 p.m.) 

Connects passionate educators with books and with each other.

Increasing Opportunities for Critical Thinking

Apple recently published a series of three books on the topic of Educational Leadership. Written in partnership with SRI Education's Center for Technology in Learning and with contributions from Apple Distinguished Educators, this series highlights the latest research and knowledge about great teaching and learning. In fact, the book Elements of Leadership features the Barrington 220 District Technology Committee as an example of shared leadership in instructional technology (page 21).

This bsd220tech series focuses on the book Elements of Learning which discusses powerful instructional strategies that engage learners and empower them to believe that their work matters. This month, we challenge the myth that you have to sacrifice rigor when trying to increase student ownership.

Elements of Learning

Part One: Teamwork
Part Two: Creativity
Part Three: Personalization

Elements of Learning—Part 4 of 5: Critical Thinking

There is a lot of excitement in the pedagogical zeitgeist about student-centered learning. We are frequently reminded of the positive impact of student choice, personalization, student ownership, and collaborative, creative endeavors. Sometimes, this message is misunderstood. I've spoken with teachers who are apprehensive about gravitating toward more student control of the learning because they believe that this shift comes at the expense of deep learning and high-level thinking. After all, if students are given too much choice and freedom, how do we ensure that students master the learning targets determined by the countless standards to which we are beholden? 

In fact, the opposite is true. In order to maximize the impact of an emphasis on creativity and student choice, students need to have lots of practice with complex thinking and content mastery. As John Hattie puts it, "If you don't teach the content, you've got nothing to inquire about." In order to unlock the full potential of student-centered learning, critical thinking is vital.  

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is inherent in any activity in which a student is asked to grapple with information they are coming to know. It's not enough to introduce students to new concepts or content on a surface level. Knowledge for its own sake fails to properly captivate a student so it "sticks" in the long term. Unless you ask students to think critically about new information, it is unlikely they will remember it for long or fully understand it. They need to do something with it—take it apart, rearrange it, compare it to previously learned knowledge, or use it in a new way.  

There are many ways to foster critical thinking with your students:

When is critical thinking most effective?

Critical thinking is most effective when it is the main task that a student is performing during the course of a lesson. For example, a group of students in a high school digital photography class are asked to search the internet to collect samples of photographs from a variety of popular online magazines. With a few minutes remaining in the period, the students are asked to share their impressions of the photos they found. In this example, critical thinking is not the main activity of the lesson, collecting samples is. To improve the critical thinking aspect of this lesson, the teacher could curate a selection of photos and share it with the class. Instead of collecting the photos themselves, the students could spend the class period analyzing and comparing the photos for design aspects such as composition and lighting. Students could then construct a definition of what elements make a successful photo for an online magazine.   

How can technology amplify critical thinking?

Technology can amplify critical thinking by improving opportunities for intellectual independence. When students are first coming to understand a new concept, a greater amount of scaffolding and support will be necessary. As a student demonstrates greater understanding, they can be given increasing amounts of independence in their work with the material. One-to-one devices and a learning management system would allow a teacher to differentiate and manage a wide variety of student challenges at the same time. For example, in an elementary STEM class students are asked to learn and sequence a set of coding commands to program a robot to perform a specific and defined task. No doubt there will be significant critical thinking in this lesson, but since every student is performing the same task and will have the same outcome, there is limited intellectual independence. Instead, students could demonstrate that they know the basic commands by creating a video of their successful solution. Next, they can be given the challenge of independently finding additional command sequences that would also get the robot to successfully perform the task. Additionally, students could be allowed to choose alternate tasks for the robot to perform.  

Want to Learn More?

Download the multitouch book, Elements of Learning, in the Apple Book Store. The book is available right now, including examples from multiple grade levels and content areas.

1. Open the Apple Books app already on your device in the Applications folder of your MacBook Air or from the App Store (or Self Service) on iPad.
2. Search for Elements of Learning.
3. Click or tap Get.
4. Enter your Apple ID and password when prompted.
5. Start reading!