Our design and technology program is really taking shape. Here are the highlights from our recent Grade 7 Project.

Every year in January we take some time to look back at the the exciting and interesting uses of technology across the school. It is an opportunity to celebrate our  teachers for creating engaging learning environments and continuing to explore what it means to teach and learn in the 21st century. Please take a moment to share some of your experiences this term in this short survey: Click here to take the survey.

Blackboard

While we may not think of it very much Blackboard is the one tool that our student touch everyday. It is where they get their announcements, their course material and increasingly it is where they submit their work. This year with the addition of many new features Blackboard has found its way back into many lessons and units as an important place for students to share, communicate and collaborate.

Popular Blackboard uses this year:

1) Course Blogs – Facilitating debate, discussion and idea sharing

2) Course Wikis – Building and collaborating unit and exam review notes

3) Safe Assign – Digital dropbox and transparent plagiarism protection for student/teachers

4) Course Journals – Private journals or developmental workbooks – easy digital archiving of student progress.  All staff have experienced this now as Helen and David have been using Journals as a tool to facilitate and monitor staff professional development and growth. The Music department continues to use Journals to host their “Developmental Workbooks” for grades 6-10.

5) Embeds – More and more teachers are embedding videos, surveys, and other media into their courses to make them more engaging.

If you are looking for even more ways to raise the level of your courses check out this showcase list of exemplary courses.

Collecting Data for Formative Assessment

Senteo & Smart Response : This great tool  continues to be used across all the subject areas and grades. Science and Art have recently been using it in interesting ways. Did you know that you can download ready made question sets from SMART? :http://exchange.smarttech.com/search.html?q=#type=SMART+Response+question+sets Click here for some more stories about Senteo in York Cclassrooms. -

IXL : http://ca.ixl.com/ - This new addition to our digital collection has been very successful and popular with the students. We not have all students from Grade 1 – 9 enrolled in IXL and are able to look at their progress as math students in a much more in depth way.

Google Surveys : Looking for a quick and easy way to capture student data and formative assessment  information. Look no further.

If you haven’t already please take a moment to share some of your experiences this term in this short survey: Click here to take the survey.

Digital Subscriptions 

Gizmos (http://www.explorelearning.com/)  have again been very popular this year in Math and Science.

Here is the newest update from explore learning.

The two equilibrium lessons use the same Gizmo, but focus on different topics. In theEquilibrium and Concentrationlesson, students observe reversible reactions to gain an understanding of why chemical equilibrium occurs and how equilibrium constants are calculated. The follow-up lesson,Equilibrium and Pressure, discusses partial pressure, Dalton’s law, and Le Chatelier’s principle.

With the Measuring Volume Gizmo, students can use a variety of containers and tools to measure the volumes of liquids and solids. Students can fill containers from a faucet, pour water from one container to another, add objects to containers, and measure the dimensions of objects with a ruler. An eyedropper is available to add or remove small amounts of water, and a magnifying glass can be used to get a close up view of a meniscus. Students can test their skills using the “Practice” mode of the Gizmo.

In the Dichotomous Keys Gizmo, students use dichotomous keys to identify a variety of plants and animals, including California albatrosses, Texas venomous snakes, and more. Students can then try creating their own dichotomous keys for organisms in the Gizmo or for organisms found where they live.

Bitstrips: This great digital storying telling tool has been popular in the middle and lower school this year. If you are looking for a different vehicle to capture student ideas and expression take a leap into Bitstrips. http://www.bitstripsforschools.com/

Discovery Education / United Streaming

Lots of new content to check out on United Streaming since we talked about it in September. Many teachers use this along with ACCESS Learning to enrich lessons.

Just in!! New French Content Theme Page

Presenting Discovery Education’s finest content in French. This collection of digital content offers a taste of the many French language resources available on Discovery Education streaming Canada, including full videos from groundbreaking series such as Planet Earth, MegaWorlds, and Canadian Geographic Presents.

You can access all of our digital subscriptions on either of our school portals

Upper School Portal - www.yorkschool.com

Lower School Portal - www.yorkschool.com

Blogging

The York Blogging project continues to flourish thanks to the addition of the Grade 9′s. Presently  all  grade 9′s and 10′s have their own blog and post to them regularly. Check out our new Blogging Portal on York Net - https://www.yorkschool.com/podium/default.aspx?t=120380 . If you are looking for a particular student you can search them on our Blog Portal here: http://yorkschoolblogs.wikispaces.com/ or  see the most recent posts here: http://blogs.yorkschool.com/yorkstudents/

We hope you take some time to leave a student a comment.

Onenote

Onenote has been our fuzzy little beast this term! OneNote is a tool that creates binder-like packages. This can be useful for project, assignment and entire units. Teachers are using it in four different ways:

1. Creating a notebook embedded with handouts, web links, images and activities and giving it to their students via the shared space (U drive), email and blackboard.
2. Instructing students to create their own notebook by themselves with the necessary units or projects labelled as tabs.
3. Instructing students to create their own notebook and over time providing them with handouts to embed within the notebook.
4. Creating a notebook for themselves for long range planning including embedded PowerPoint slides, assessment rubrics, class notes, handouts and activities.

Some examples include:

P.E. Fitness Logs for grade 6 – 10

-          Students record fitness data within a ready-made fitness log

MYP Tech and ICE Education Game Project for grade 9

-          Students develop their entire project within this file

MYP Tech and Math Bathroom Design Challenge for grade 9

-          Students develop their entire project within this file

Design Tech Journals for grades 6 – 9

-          Students use their journals for various D&T projects

Smartboard

The SMART Board continues to be used extensively throughout the Middle and Upper School.

Many teachers are downloading and utilizing interactive modules / lessons, diagrams and activities from the online database: SMART Exchange. SMART Exchange is a free database that contains subject and grade specific interactive activities built to be used on the SMART Board.

SMART Notebook also contains a variety of interactive activities, tools and images within the Gallery tool tab.

A few teachers have also used the SMART Recorder to capture screen video and upload to blackboard or youtube.

Here are some items you can try to help make your class more interactive:

• Check out SMART Notebook > Gallery Tools tab on the far left, type key words into the search bar to find interactive tools and / or images
• Check out SMART Exchange for new and improved interactive lessons or activities (use subject, grade or key word to help you find activities)
• Check out SMART Recorder (type “smart recorder”) into the Windows search bar and record your own screen captured video

Robotics

The Lego robotics program has kicked off at TYS this year! We’ve started with grade 6 with a unit called Relief and Rescue. Their task is to create a robot that completes a series of challenges related to providing humans with relief and rescue during man-made and / or human-made disasters. They used their D&T OneNote file to document the stages of the design cycle. In groups of 3-4 the students have:

1. Investigated and discussed robots, robotics as well as relief and rescue
2. Been introduced to the first challenge: create a robot to deliver a relief package across the robotics platform (4’ x 6’) and make a sound to alert people of the package’s arrival
3. Designed a robotic device using Lego Digital Designer
4. Created a robot used NXT Lego Robotics Kits for challenge 1
5. Completed challenge 1 and have been introduced to challenge 2: detect and avoid landmines of the robotics platform
6. Re-design, re-built, re-programmed their robotic devices for challenge 2

There will be 3-4 more challenges left in the unit. We are also hoping to showcase the final challenges to the grade 5 students at the end of the unit!

Google Docs

Google docs is a powerful way to encourage mass collaboration between teaching partners / colleagues as well as within your class.

Teachers are using google docs in three ways:

1. Creating google forms to gather data from students or from parents
2. Encouraging students to create google forms to gather data for assignments
3. Creating documents that are shared with the students – students collaborate either in class or outside of class (e.g. a collaborative French dictionary, group math activity resulting in a class created math document for future review)

Check out:

• A new version of Google presentations with character-by-character collaboration – plus new transitions, animations, and themes
• Comments in Google documents, followed by improvements including collapsible discussions, better email notifications, and a more detailed discussion pane
• Comment-only access in documents that allows others to view and comment on your doc without editing
• Pivot tables in spreadsheets to process and summarize large data sets in seconds
• Pagination in documents that provide visual page breaks on the screen
• A new look across Google Docs and Sites for a more consistent web experience

Multi-Media Lab

The new multi-media lab has seen lots of use in the last four months. The student produced weekly edition of York School TV  has been very popular.

Some notable projects that have gone through the lab have been.

• Grade 12 Group 4 – “Myth Busters”
• Grade 10 Drama – Parody Videos
• Grade 9 ICE – Toronto Island Shorts
• Grade 9 French – Tours du Paris

with lots more on the way………………..

Did you know that Word 2010 and the rest of the Office Suite have a bunch of new features.

File

1. NEW – Template Gallery
2. File leads to many options
3. Recent documents

Home

1. Text Effects
2. Changing Case

Insert

1. Cover page
2. Screenshot
3. Hyperlinking and bookmarks
4. Drop Caps

Images Tools (click on image)

1. Remove background
2. Corrections
3. color
4. artistic effects
5. Picture styles
6. Crop

Reference

1. Citations

Review

1. Spelling, Thesaurus, Translate
2. Start Inking

Created by: Infographic World

In this Huff Post Education article, C.M. Rubin interviews British researcher Dylan Wiliam on embedded formative assessments, which he has piloted with more than 1,000 teacher learning communities around the world. Wiliam says that in one study in Great Britain, students whose teachers used this approach effectively learned 75 percent more than those taught by other teachers in the same schools.

“When a teacher teaches, no matter how well he or she might design a lesson, what a child learns is unpredictable,” says Wiliam. “Children do not always learn what we teach. That is why the most important assessment does not happen at the end of the learning – it happens during the learning, when there is still time to do something with the information. Our goal is to get teachers to pay more attention to what is being learned while the actual learning is taking place.”

Wiliam bemoans the fact that schools don’t require teachers to improve their competence every year. “Instead, teachers are required to show that they have endured a certain amount of professional development (and these are usually specified in number of hours) to continue to be employed, or acquire new qualifications, but they don’t need to get better at teaching. Every teacher needs to be getting better – not because they’re not good enough, but because they can be even better. Every teacher needs to get better at something that will make a difference to their students, such as classroom assessment.”

Ideally, all teachers are required to do that, but the way they do it should be up to them. It’s also a helpful practice for teachers to make promises about how they will improve to a group of peers and then report back on a monthly basis.

Wiliam believes there are five key strategies necessary for embedded assessments to work well:

-   Sharing learning intentions with students;

-   Eliciting evidence of achievement through on-the-spot assessments;

-   Providing feedback to students that moves learning forward;

-   Activating students as learning resources for one another;

-   Activating students as owners of their own learning.

Keeping Learning on Track is a curriculum package designed by Wiliam and his colleagues for use in schools over a two-year period, available from the Northwest Evaluation Association in Portland, OR.

“The Global Search for Education: What Did You Learn Today?” by C.M. Rubin in Huff Post Education, Sept. 20, 2011, http://huff.to/pamxsR

Reposted from the Marshall Memos

Workshop: Why Transfer of Learning is a Common Consequent of Teaching for Critical Thinking…

Presenter: Dr Richard Paul

Transfer of learning is sometimes seen as an elusive process.  But when we have command of the concepts and principles of critical thinking, we see them as the logical means for transfer of knowledge and ideas.  For instance, when we understand that all reasoning entails assumptions, we can begin to look for assumptions within any field or discipline; we can relate the assumptions within disciplines to one another.  When we understand that all reasoning entails concepts, we can begin to identify and connect concepts within and among disciplines.  When we understand that all high quality reasoning entails the consistent use of intellectual standards, we can explicitly identify the intellectual standards relevant to thinking well within any field or discipline; we can identify the intellectual standards relevant to good reasoning within all disciplines.  This session will thus explore the concepts and principles of critical thinking in relationship with transferring knowledge and learning.

A Checklist for Reasoning

1) All reasoning has a PURPOSE.

• Take time to state your purpose clearly.
• Distinguish your purpose from related purposes.
• Check periodically to be sure you are still on target.
• Choose significant and realistic purposes.

2) All reasoning is an attempt to FIGURE something out, to settle some QUESTION, solve some PROBLEM.

• Take time to clearly and precisely state the question at issue.
• Express the question in several ways to clarify its meaning and scope.
• Break the question into sub-questions.
• Identify if the question has one right answer, is a matter of mere opinion, or requires reasoning from more than one point of view.

3) All reasoning is based on ASSUMPTIONS.

• Clearly identify your assumptions and determine whether they are justifiable.
• Consider how your assumptions are shaping your point of view.

4) All reasoning is done from some POINT OF VIEW.

• Identify your point of view.
• Seek other points of vies and identify their strengths as well as weaknesses.
• Strive to be fairminded in evaluating all points of view.

5) All reasoning is based on DATA, INFORMATION, & EVIDENCE.

• Restrict your claims to those supported by the data you have.
• Search for information that opposes your position as well as information that supports it.
• Make sure that all information used is clear, accurate, and relevant to the question at issue.
• Make sure you have gathered sufficient information.

6) All reasoning is expressed through, and shaped by, CONCEPTS and IDEAS.

• Identify key concepts and explain them clearly.
• Consider alternative concepts or alternative definitions to concepts.
• Make sure you are using concepts with care and precision.

7) All reasoning contains INFERENCES or INTERPRETATIONS by which we draw CONCLUSIONS and give meaning to data.

• Infer only what the evidence implies.
• Check inferences for their consistency with each other.
• Identify assumptions which lead you to your inferences.

All reasoning leads somewhere or has IMPLICATIONS and CONSEQUENCES.

• Trace the implications and consequences that follow from your reasoning.
• Search for negative as well as positive implications
• Consider all possible implications.

31st International Conference on Critical Thinking 

Workshop: What are intellectual traits and how does one teach for them?
Presenter: Richard Paul

Workshop Notes:

Critical thinking is not just a set of intellectual skills. It is a way of orienting oneself in the world. It is a way of approaching problems that differs significantly from that which is typical in human life. People may have critical thinking skills and abilities, and yet still be unable to enter viewpoints with which they disagree. They may have critical thinking abilities, and yet still be unable to analyze the beliefs that guide their behavior. They may have critical thinking abilities, and yet be unable to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know, to persevere through difficult problems and issues, to think fairmindedly, to stand alone against the crowd. This session focuses on designing instruction that transforms the mind, instruction that fosters the development of fairmindedness, intellectual humility, intellectual perseverance, intellectual courage, intellectual empathy, intellectual autonomy, intellectual integrity, and confidence in reason.

Forms of Thinking

• Uncritical Thinking (re actively, simply,emotionally, etc)
• Critical Thinking (Selfish & Unselfish)

• Intellectual Humility: Having a consciousness of the limits of one’s knowledge, including a sensitivity to circumstances in which one’s native egocentrism is likely to function self-deceptively; sensitivity to bias, prejudice and limitations of one’s viewpoint. Intellectual humility depends on recognizing that one should not claim more than one actually knows. It does not imply spinelessness or submissiveness. It implies the lack of intellectual pretentiousness, boastfulness, or conceit, combined with insight into the logical foundations, or lack of such foundations, of one’s beliefs.
• Intellectual Courage: Having a consciousness of the need to face and fairly address ideas, beliefs or viewpoints toward which we have strong negative emotions and to which we have not given a serious hearing. This courage is connected with the recognition that ideas considered dangerous or absurd are sometimes rationally justified (in whole or in part) and that conclusions and beliefs inculcated in us are sometimes false or misleading. To determine for ourselves which is which, we must not passively and uncritically “accept” what we have “learned.” Intellectual courage comes into play here, because inevitably we will come to see some truth in some ideas considered dangerous and absurd, and distortion or falsity in some ideas strongly held in our social group. We need courage to be true to our own thinking in such circumstances. The penalties for non-conformity can be severe.
• Intellectual Empathy: Having a consciousness of the need to imaginatively put oneself in the place of others in order to genuinely understand them, which requires the consciousness of our egocentric tendency to identify truth with our immediate perceptions of long-standing thought or belief. This trait correlates with the ability to reconstruct accurately the viewpoints and reasoning of others and to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas other than our own. This trait also correlates with the willingness to remember occasions when we were wrong in the past despite an intense conviction that we were right, and with the ability to imagine our being similarly deceived in a case-at-hand.
• Intellectual Integrity: Recognition of the need to be true to one’s own thinking; to be consistent in the intellectual standards one applies; to hold one’s self to the same rigorous standards of evidence and proof to which one holds one’s antagonists; to practice what one advocates for others; and to honestly admit discrepancies and inconsistencies in one’s own thought and action.
• Intellectual Perseverance: Having a consciousness of the need to use intellectual insights and truths in spite of difficulties, obstacles, and frustrations; firm adherence to rational principles despite the irrational opposition of others; a sense of the need to struggle with confusion and unsettled questions over an extended period of time to achieve deeper understanding or insight.
• Faith In Reason: Confidence that, in the long run, one’s own higher interests and those of humankind at large will be best served by giving the freest play to reason, by encouraging people to come to their own conclusions by developing their own rational faculties; faith that, with proper encouragement and cultivation, people can learn to think for themselves, to form rational viewpoints, draw reasonable conclusions, think coherently and logically, persuade each other by reason and become reasonable persons, despite the deep-seated obstacles in the native character of the human mind and in society as we know it.
  
• Fairmindedness: Having a consciousness of the need to treat all viewpoints alike, without reference to one’s own feelings or vested interests, or the feelings or vested interests of one’s friends, community or nation; implies adherence to intellectual standards without reference to one’s own advantage or the advantage of one’s group.

The OCT has come out with their social media policy. All teachers should watch this to learn about the new standards and best practices in this area.