Monthly Archives: March 2011

My best post ever!

I hinted on Twitter last week that I was anticipating great things. I mean we had our state tech conference and March Madness, but I also had a secret that I hoped would come true.

Well today I accepted a history position at Kent Innovations High. It is a new project based school starting next fall through our county intermediate school district. It is part of New Tech High that is spreading in the mid-west.  This school integrates the curriculum of the four core subjects into student centered projects. It also works with local businesses to give students real problems to solve. This model of school represents so much of what I believe is best about learning.

The crazy part about this job is that it starts right after spring break. The staff gets all spring and summer to get to know each other, be trained,  and design the curriculum! We will actually be given time to be prepared to make this work. The school space is also being re-modeled so that it looks more like a Starbucks than a traditional classroom.

I can not really express how excited I am about this opportunity. There have been disappointments the past couple of years that I did not want to express publicly, but I am seeing that it is all working out for the best now.

I will continue to blog here in a similar fashion, but the focus will naturally turn to what we are doing in this school. I will also probably blog about history more, but will cover all core subjects as our projects will be integrated. I hope we will also be helping students to use on-line tools to collaborate with others and share their learning. I will be calling on my online community to create interesting learning opportunities for my new students. I can’t wait to get started…

My MACUL11 presentation

I presented for the second time at MACUL this year on the topic of collaboration based on the video games my students made with students in Vietnam. Overall I was very happy with how it went. I had less attendees than last year, but great conversations. My goal going in was to get the audience to participate and not just have me talk at them for an hour. I created a backchannel for the session and at first was disappointed that no one used it, but then I realized that was because they were having real conversations instead!

I would like to thank @bruce1lj, @kchichester, @TheNerdyTeacher, and my tech support @toddhower for their participation in my session. (I would thank the rest of you but do not know your twitter names) It was fun to meet these people face-to-face for the first time in my session, and they definitely added to the conversation. The highlight for me was Skyping in my collaboration partner Gary Bertoia from Vietnam followed by four of my students at school. The audience was able to ask them questions and hear about our project from multiple perspectives.

Here is my Prezi which probably will not make much sense without the audio 🙂

I Ustreamed the session, but forgot to start the recording until I was a few minutes in. The video is not so great but you can hear the discussions. The skype calls start at about the 33:30  mark if you want to jump to that part.

Here is the Livebinder that I created for my session. It contains a lot of information that was not talked about in the session, but to help you in your collaboration efforts including tools, collaboration examples, places to connect, and the Scratch games that the students created.