Detailed programming listing to follow.

Complementary lunch provided by SugarSnap. Certificate of attendance available for documentation of professional development hours.

Reserve your seat here: iPads in the VT Classroom

NOW AVAILABLE:

Materials from 11/14/12 Tech Tips session by Maria McCormack
1st and 2nd grade teacher, Allen Brook School, Williston Vermont

Featuring: How to Get Started with Podcasting (10 Easy Steps), Podcasting to differentiate instruction and accommmodate all learners, student scoring rubric.

  

Download the pdf handout from the session here:

2. Double-tap the round "navel" button on your iPad, bringing up a gray bar at the bottom of your screen. This shows all the apps you currently have running.

3. Swipe your finger left-to-right until you can see the brightness and volume controls. You should also see an AirPlay icon. The AirPlay icon is the blue icon in the photo below.

4. You should now be seeing the contents of your iPad on the machine you have Reflection installed on:

Reflection allows you to record video (complete with native audio from the apps). Great for making tutorials and demonstrating relevant portions of apps.

Read the rest of the story here

[View the rest of the story "At the VT 1:1 2012 Conference" on Storify]

Above, a one-minute screencast of actual game-play, featuring germs, viruses, tapeworms and everything that your students would need to know about killing them.

Cost: Free
Publisher: The Rice University Center for Technology and Teaching
Ages: 9+
Keywords: science, STEM, how germs work, medicine, gaming

"Students are influenced daily, by advertising propaganda.  It is important to make them aware of media so that they become more critical consumers and less victims of media consumption.  We will share an engaging media literacy unit and an advertisement project that incorporates both art and literacy skills and includes a variety of Google tools such as the free graphic program Google draw, and forms, presentations and videos."

First presented at Dynamic Landscapes 2012.

The Tarrant Institute was proud to join collaborators from several of their i-Leap schools in presenting at Dynamic Landscapes 2012 this past May in Burlington, and resources and video from those sessions will be made available by the beginning of August. John Downes and Susan Hennessey were joined by collaborators in presenting the highly successful technology strand at the 19th annual Middle Grades Institute in June. Additionally, Tarrant Institute collaborators will be presenting at AMLE and VTFest this fall.

If you're interested in more information or resources from any particular presentation session, please let us know.

"We have learned that preparing schools for 21st century learning is less about designing engaging activities for students and more about unleashing the learning potential of students and the technologies with which they are familiar. The infusion of technology in schools is merely an extension of the extraordinary expansion of technology available to students in their lives. Their spontaneous use of technologies in their out-of-school lives reflects, to a remarkable degree, young adolescents' applications of 21st-century skills in pursuit of personal efficacy. One of our I-Leap teachers said it best: "The shift isn't in the students. The shift is in the teachers. We don't have to convince the students that this is the way to learn."

Read the full article here

Per RETN-VT: "RETN recently provided equipment and technical assistance to students from Frederick H. Tuttle Middle School in South Burlington so they could participate in democracy by documenting a Naturalization Ceremony at the school."

More about Keith Nemlich:

"This year marks my fourth year at MEMS and my third year as the Technology Coordinator. Prior to arriving here, I taught 4th grade to 8th grade students at Flood Brook Union School and the Jamaica Village School. While the computer is a powerful tool, never forget that it was human ingenuity that turned sand into the computer."

6th grader Thomas Suarez talks about creating applications for iPhones, iPods and iPads: how he got started, the environment he creates in, and how the application-creation club he started at his school works with the teachers and districts. A part of the TED Talks series, focusing on Technology, Information and Design.

Way shinier than a standard periodic table. It allows users to explore the elements in a more interactive approach using 3D, rotatable images. Users can also investigate the detailed history, discovery and chemical properties of each element.

While the audio narration is engaging and the environment visually attractive, the feature most impressive to us is the ability to adjust the reading level on each page of the book. 

Three levels of text are available with a simple swipe of the finger, which move from simple sentences and monosyllabic words to complex sentences with multisyllabic Tier 3 words. Students can self select and challenge themselves to move up levels upon consecutive reads. Teachers could craft a lesson to work with students to create their own levels of text; the task would be to start from the basic level and build the next two levels by challenging students to play with synonyms and connotation as well as exploring syntax complexity.

Search on current events! Explore the taxonomy of newts! Or just let your students show you what they're interested in exploring in your classroom.

Wednesday
Feb 8, 2012
4-6pm

Montpelier Union
High School
Montpelier VT

Access also available via the LNV network, please contact us to set up remote sites.

Instructor: 
Susan Hennessey

Preregistration required 
limit: 25 physical seats at Montpelier HS; other LNV locations to be announced.

Please register online here.

“I’m letting everyone on Twitter who's interested in technology or middle level education know about our upcoming workshop,” explains Homan. “We’ll also announce it on the technology educators’ list-serv and post a link on the Vita-Learn and VAMLE websites. Basically, wherever online we think we’ll find folks who’d be interested in attending.”

During the events themselves, Homan frequently tweets on notable quotes or activities as they occur, then uploads the presentations to the Tarrant website as well as distributing a slideshow of event photos via flickr.

As part of a recent federal grant project, the Tarrant Institute created elearningvt.org, a communal blog where middle school teachers from around Vermont contributed artefacts from their classroom work and blogged about them. The website features videos, photos and curriculum units on digital storytelling, learning through gaming, 1:1 laptop integration and a host of other topics. The educators themselves presented the website at May's Dynamic Landscapes conference at Champlain College.

Across the hall, in the Asian Studies Outreach Program (ASOP), Jacqueline Drouin just uploaded new pictures on the program's Facebook page.

“We Facebook, we tweet, we blog,” says Drouin. "Our blog for our Visiting Scholars has allowed us to share with a larger audience the positive impact the teachers from Thailand and China having in the schools." The Visiting Scholar program invites teachers from Thailand and China to spend six months to a year in Vermont. During that time, the teachers contribute weekly posts and pictures, documenting their life abroad for their families and students back home.

On the third floor, at the Center on Disability and Community Inclusion (CDCI), Michaella Collins uses the UVM News Tool to announce the hiring of the new Vermont State I-Team director. "Once the story is published on our webpage via the newstool, I have the option to share the article with twitter, Facebook, blogger, and even LinkedIn." Michaela says, referring to the 300+ social media options the NewsTool story is automatically linked up to. "We're able to communicate with a larger audience."

Getting everyone to tweet has been made easier by the ability for faculty and staff to tweet from their phones, another facet of the social media revolution. Being able to contribute items to twitter feeds and the program websites while out doing field work in Vermont has made staff, faculty and students enthusiastic adopters. "Everyone tweets," says Tarrant Institute director and Education Department professor Penny Bishop. "It's a wide reaching and accessible medium for sharing information. We come across a compelling story, a promising strategy, or intriguing new tool and voila! We can share it instantaneously with our school partners and others."

Everyone at both the Tarrant Institute and ASOP has their own twitter account and tweets automatically feed to the program websites.

The urge to use social media is itself viral: “I didn’t really start using social media until the Tarrant Institute moved in across the hall," Drouin said. "Then it was like, ‘How do you use diigo? How are you using Facebook? What’s that website you’re using?’ At that point, a whole world of outreach possibilities opened up.” Because both programs are active in Vermont's social media community, according to Drouin, it's made the learning process easier and, to some extent, helped keep up momentum. The collaborative environment feeds itself, and has recently spread to the rest of the college: at the Dean’s request, the CESS Communications Committee has recently undertaken to increase social media use among its departments. At monthly meetings, staff train each other on new tools and brainstorm ways to use social media to further the missions of each individual unit.

But for Jacqueline Drouin, it’s simple: “Social media is creating a global community and is bringing our CESS community closer together. We can share more easily our accomplishments and support for our missions.”

Thursday, Sept 29th, 4-6pm. 202 Mann Hall, UVM

Register here; enrollment limited to 25.

Inventor, author and game designer Marc Prensky addressed more than 100 Vermont middle grades educators, administrators and lecturers to open the 18^th annual Middle Grades Conference at UVM on June 27, 2011. Prensky’s latest textbook, "Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for Real Learning" was one of the seminal texts being used to guide the curriculum at this year’s conference.

Prensky reiterated his theory of digital natives (students) vs. digital immigrants (educators and other adults) and continued to promote the idea that as digital natives, students can more effectively integrate technology into learning by being treated as partners in the classroom, rather than simply learners.

Prensky is a strong proponent of open-phone tests – that is, in-class tests during which students can search for the answers on their smartphones – and to demonstrate, gave the audience 60 seconds to answer a trivia question about a 20^th century geneticist. As audience members struggled to come up with the right answer, Prensky commented that students could usually do it much faster, another illustration of the digital divide.

The highlight of Prensky’s keynote came when a panel of ten local middle grades students agreed to answer questions from the assembled audience. "What advice would you give your teachers?" they were asked.

"Change the way you teach every week," came one answer. "Make it interesting," said another student, "or we’re just going to text our friends at our desks."

Another question posed was: "What bores you the most?"

"When teachers talk and talk and talk and talk," came the quick reply. "We just fall asleep!"

Addressing the value of having Prensky come to the conference and expand on his digital natives theory, education department professor Penny Bishop explained, "We are particularly drawn to Prensky's work because of the connections he makes between digital learning and student involvement. Unlike those who merely promote technology as the key to engaging today's young adolescents in learning, we agree with Prensky's premise that educators must focus not ‘only on the changing technology, but rather to conceptualize learning in a new way, with adults and young people each taking on new and different roles from the past.’ Prensky effectively makes the case for students as authentic partners in the teaching and learning process."

Edmunds Middle School principal Bonnie Johnson-Aten, an attendee at the conference said of Prensky’s talk: "Lots of provocative things to consider, lots of things to take back to my staff. Especially the stuff about cellphones."

The Middle Grades Conference is the annual culmination of work facilitated by the Middle Grades Institute, an organization featuring instructors from UVM and nearby St. Michael’s College. This year the conference was also sponsored by the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education, part of UVM’s College of Education and Social Services.

This year’s gathering, which ran from June 27^th to July 1st, was the largest in the event’s 18-year history and was hosted by UVM for the first time.