Who Are Your Top 10 Connected Educators?

I am excited to be part of a team brought together by the US Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology to create an EdTech Developer's Guide over the next six weeks.  The main goal of this initiative is to provide information and resources that will help developers gain a better understanding of the complex and evolving education landscape.  This will, in turn, lead to more effective and meaningful technology integration as these products and services will better align with the needs of students and educators throughout the nation.

A section of this handbook will provide developers with "top ten lists" of connected educators, blogs, events, and podcasts.  What better place to start creating these lists than to reach out to all of you in my incredible PLN!

We will start with connected educators.  Who would you include in your top 10 list?  

If you are interested in participating, please enter up to 10 (less is certainly ok) educators in the form below that you strongly believe we should include in the publication.

Form Link
I thank you for your contributions to this exciting new (and I believe incredibly valuable) project.  I will continue reaching out over the next few weeks for more feedback and also for educators who are interested in contributing vignettes for the final publication.

"Level Up With Gamification" Event Archive

I recently had the fortune of again teaming up with colleague Brian Germain and the team at Highlander Institute to conduct our "Level Up With Gamification" event.  As expected, Brian rocked it with his contagious enthusiasm, while Shawn Rubin of Highlander did an awesome job with the logistics and providing us with incredible feedback.  The teachers and administrators who attended did a great job of diving right into our competitions and asked thoughtful questions throughout.  I'd also like to thank Roshni Mirchandi for providing great feedback for us as well via the Edthena platform and for attending last week's session.

For those who could not attend either event but are interested in gamification, I have included the Google Presentation and video archive below.  The presentation is from our most recent event (12/12), while the video is from our previous session (11/14).  Although we made a few improvements to the recent event, the video from the first still aligns well with the Google Presentation below.

Level Up Google Presentation (12/12/13)



Level Up Video Archive (11/14/13)




 As always, please reach out and connect with us if you have any questions or comments.  Level up!

Flipped Mastery Discussion With Mike Bruckner

I recently had an incredible conversation with Mike Bruckner regarding Flipped Mastery, particularly how to structure and manage mastery learning.  In conversations leading up to our GHO, it was evident that Mike had put a tremendous amount of time and effort into understanding mastery learning as well as predicting some of the challenges that he would face during implementation.  I therefore thought that recording our conversation on air would prove helpful to many of those who shared similar interests, concerns, or general questions about the approach.

 Here are just a few of the topics that we covered:

Why Flipped Mastery?
Learning Goals
Assessments / Rubrics
Learning Experiences (Group Work)
Retakes
Acclimating Students / Parents
Grading Systems

Here is the Google Document that we worked off of during our discussion, including commentary and helpful resources links.

The archived conversation is included below.  Please reach out to Mike and I if interested in Flipped Mastery or moving towards a mastery learning environment in general.  Mike is well on his way towards implementing a robust mastery system and is another great resource for anyone considering this approach.

View on YouTube

A Method For Mastery

About six weeks ago, Tina Rosenberg from the New York Times contacted me regarding an article that she was writing for the "Fixes" column.  After writing an initial article about Flipped Classrooms, she was interested in how educators were evolving beyond the traditional flipped approach (i.e. video lectures for homework / homework in class.)

After contacting Flipped Learning pioneer Jon Bergmann to experience his story and viewpoints on the topic, I was referred to her by Jon to describe how I have similarly merged my flipped classroom with mastery learning.  After speaking with Tina for about 45 minutes, it was clear how passionate she was about this topic, particularly how flipping enables educators to be creative and innovate at the classroom level.  I was surprised at how interested she was not only in mastery learning, but also how we have "gamified" our World History courses at PHS.  As I mentioned to her, once you transition towards a mastery learning environment, adding game layers to the class is not as difficult as one might think.

Here is the link to the Times article, "In Flipped Classrooms, A Method For Mastery."  Overall, Tina did a great job explaining the convergence of Flipped Classrooms and mastery learning.  Any comments that you have regarding the column (or my approach in general) is of course welcome.

Diving Into Augmented Reality

Over the past few months, I have been exploring the benefits and learning opportunities made possible by emerging augmented reality (AR) technologies.  First, I had to get a better grasp regarding what "augmented reality" actually is.  Here is a helpful description:

"...augmented reality blurs the line between what's real and what's computer-generated by enhancing what we see, hear, feel and smell. On the spectrum between virtual reality.... and the real world, augmented reality is closer to the real world. Augmented reality adds graphics, sounds, haptic feedback and smell to the natural world as it exists."  Source 

My main source of information regarding augmented reality in education has been The Two Guys Show podcast on Edreach, hosted by Brad Waid and Drew Minoch.  They have also created an awesome website called Two Guys and Some iPads with incredible AR sources.

In a recent post, I demonstrated how my son has been using the colAR mix app to bring his coloring pages to life, as well as some fun I was having with Aurasma by augmenting my daughter crawling out from behind our couch.  Since then, my 2-year-old son has also loved the AR Flashcards which bring animals and dinosaurs to life as he learns his letters (and dino names of course). See image to the right.

As I began recognizing the awesome potential that AR has for learning, I committed to making a channel on Aurasma for my students. My first trial run at making an "aura" with the Aurasma Studio Account was to augment the FlippedHistoryVideos trailer onto the Flipped History logo image.  After a few initial attempts, it worked!   If you are interested in viewing the aura, follow the steps below:

Step 1

Install Aurasma onto your mobile device: iOS & Android

Step 2

Subscribe to the Flipped History Channel

Option 1

Go to http://auras.ma/s/O1QFP

Option 2

Scan the following QR Code to the right

Once you have the Aurasma app and are following the Flipped History Channel, you should be able to view the aura below.  To do this, open Aurasma and point your device at the trigger image below.  You should then see a purple swirl appear.  Soon after (quickly if on wifi, longer if via 3/4G), the Flipped History Videos trailer should augment and play over the image. 

If you have trouble viewing the aura, just let me know and I can help you troubleshoot the issue.  This is a very new process for people, and the technology is still relatively new, so experiencing challenges along the way is part of it. Hang in there!  On the other hand, if it worked, that is awesome!  You are already on your way to making your own unique auras.   

AR in the Classroom

Since the Flipped History Aurasma Channel has been up and running, I have incorporated AR into the following two projects. 

1. AP European History students are creating auras for primary source visuals in our text.

2. World History students are creating auras as part of the world religions project and posting them on our new "Aura Wall."

As we finish up these projects, I look forward to sharing our experiences in future posts.  Until then, if you have any questions about these AR projects or are just interested in exploring the possibilities, as always, please let me know.