11. Here’s what I need your help
with…how can we best use the iPad to
learn in class? What apps do you find
helpful? What possibilities can we
unlock with the iPad? I have a few
ideas that I’ll be sharing with you
when we return, but I know that you’ll
have great ideas too! We are a TEAM!
Share your mana’o!
Our objective for today is to share our PLC journey.
Started a PLC with the TEACHERS learning in mind which we knew would ultimately affect student learning. The Goal of the PLC in the beginning was to have teachers become comfortable using iPads and to share what they learn.
We also wanted to demonstrate learning 21st century skills
Blog – 100% of our teachers blog so we knew teachers would be comfortable with using the blog. We also believe in the importance of sharing so the Blog is our way of sharing globally. Carmen’s going to talk more about the blog later. Facebook Group – the FB group was set up to share resources privately and quicklyGoogle Docs – we used G-docs for our minutes so we could share the document and everyone would have easy access and we didin’t have to email documents back and forth.
1st Meeting – teachers had lots of questions about where they could find educational apps so we shared some resources and how to browse for content area and grade level specific apps. We also shared the Blog and the App rubric, which Carmen will be talking about, and some examples of app reviews on the Blog. We showed how to log into the facebook group and post.
We didn’t tell teachers they HAD to post to the blog or group, or even show up to the face to face meetings for that matter, we were there to support them when they needed it. Meetings are on Friday from 3-4, Kindergarten teachers show up even after all day field trip…
These are the two questions that really drove our conversations. The conversations that happened were amazing! Example – a teacher would share an app and how it was used and then people would have all kids of additional ideas that we all shared with each other.
The Blog was chosen as the main form of tracking our project because it was familiar to teachers. Also seemed a good choice for us to be able to share what we were doing with a global audience, and to create a place where teachers could find a variety of resources.(Show main parts of blog – how to navigate)
Rubric – the rubric was a good idea, but in retrospect it seems a little lengthy and teachers didn’t really follow it. There’s a great site called edshelf that has a cool rating system we will probably follow in the future.We’ve found when we share out apps, teachers want to learn how to use the app, which many times wuld take up the whole hour to do. In the future we’re going to survey teachers and have some specific app training and hopefully populate our tutorial link on our blog. We’d also like to have more student app reviews on the blog as well as more access to iPads