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World Of Difference

Posted by Unknown Rabu, 11 Desember 2013 0 komentar

In my opinion one of the most important roles in any school is that of Media Specialist. Over the years I have longed to create a position that would serve a multi-faceted role of librarian, media specialist, and educational technologist. The challenge for me though was that Shannon Miller's, Joyce Valenza's, and Gwyneth Jones's don't grow on trees. This mere challenge did not deter me in my search in the least bit as I had my eyes set on one such individual that fit this mold perfectly. That person was Laura Fleming, who in her own right has been blazing a trail in the transmedia world for the past couple of years. Once I knew I had this position available the courting process began.

Luckily for me, but more importantly my students and staff, Laura jumped on the opportunity to become a part of the transformation that has been occurring at New Milford High School the past couple of years. Upon hiring Laura I challenged her right off the bat to embrace her new role as an innovative change agent in a space that is extremely outdated and to collaborate with staff in order to push their boundaries to authentically engage students. Our vision for her was to provide meaningful learning opportunities for our students while supporting teachers in the process of effective technology and media literacy integration. I told her to only come to me with solutions to problems and not excuses as to why something could not be done or implemented.

I write this post extremely proud that Laura has run with the autonomy she has been granted and has joined a cadre of NMHS educators and students who are constantly redefining what education should look like in the digital age. She has become a pillar of sustainable change. Here are a few highlights from her short tenure thus far:

Created a digital badge platform to recognize informal learning being undertaken by NMHS staff. Check out this great article from the School Library Journal on this project. Currently she is now working on a similar program for students here.
Collaborated with Mrs. Westbrook in the English Department on the school's first virtual film festival. Students filmed documentaries based on the New York Times One in 8 Million film project. The film festival took place both in person and on Twitter. Student films were tweeted to #knightatthemoviesfall and as the films were viewed, students tweeted film reviews. Students were taught how to effectively tweet a film review and were encouraged to be smart, be positive, and to focus on content and technique. View the Storify here, which includes all films and tweets related to this festival.
Facilitated a #mysteryskpe with a school in Georgia. Numerous NMHS teachers participated in this educational game. The aim of the game was to guess the location of the other classroom by asking each other questions. This involved using online maps and doing some research. The purpose of this Skype was to expose teachers to a wonderful educational tool that they can use with their classes.
Collaborated with business teacher Mrs. Vicari and her students on developing apps for their small businesses using iBuildApp. Students were introduced to the concept of mCommerce and how it can be used to leverage the marketing and promotion of their products in this digital age.
Collaborated with special education teacher Mrs. Mackey and her students in beta-testing a new writing platform called Paperlet. Paperlet is an online participatory publishing platform that takes the existing traditional writing process a decisive step further by bringing the readers into the creative process too. Writers and readers come together in a uniquely combined effort. Writers gather feedback on their writing from readers and are then able to refine their stories based on this feedback. Paperlet guides students through the process of expanding their writing into this new media form.
Created a Makerspace in the media center. Check out this nice article by the Center of Digital Education on the space that Laura has created.
Collaborated with English teachers Mrs. Groff and Mrs. Westbrook on a research project related to CNN Everyday Heroes. Students researched heroes, curated their research using Pinterest and cited their sources using the online citation maker, EasyBib.
Worked with the IT department to develop a procedure to sign out Chromebooks for any student to use throughout the school day as part of our BYOD initiative.

Laura Fleming is having a substantial impact on the culture here at NMHS. In September she created a new blog called Worlds of Learning. It is safe to say that she is making a World of Difference here at NMHS.

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Critical Literacy Across the Curriculum

Posted by Unknown Senin, 04 November 2013 0 komentar

How can an English teacher help to develop critical literacy across the curriculum? What follows is a guest post from NMHS teachers who have been collaborating with English teacher Joanna Westbrook to create authentic literacy tasks in each of their disciplines. You will hear from a science teacher, a social studies teacher, and an art teacher as each provides her take on how the Common Core and 21st Century learning goals affect what goes on in the classroom.

Image credit: http://allthingslearning.wordpress.com/tag/critical-literacy/

A Biology Teacher’s Thoughts on Critical Literacy by Lynne Torpie

Science teachers can tend to be myopic, focusing on acquiring content detail and teaching the steps of the scientific method instead of fostering the investigative, critical thinking and written communication skills that embody real-world scientific endeavors. As science teachers for the 21st century, we are tasked with producing, at the bare minimum, citizens who are conversant with the language of science, and who can read, make sense of and make decisions about scientific issues. Optimally, we inspire our students to pursue a career in which they will be posing relevant questions, and using research and inquiry to answer those questions to contribute to humanity’s general body of knowledge or, through technology and engineering, solve problems. Literacy skills are the foundation upon which these outcomes are built.

But we as science teachers can be daunted by the mandate to incorporate English language skills into the curriculum. We have neither the training to assess such skills nor the language to develop such assessments. We are concerned about our students’ weak explanatory writing skills and would like to see those skills improve. But we need help. While we can develop assessments that approximate authentic science writing tasks, we need help identifying the literacy elements we should be assessing. We need guidance in phrasing a rubric so it is clear to both students and teachers what we are looking for when assessing literacy in science. Even more importantly, we need to partner with English teachers to provide the scaffolding necessary for our students to write informational text with increasing clarity.

Presenting Infographics in Science: That’s why I began the year with a conversation with Mrs. Westbrook (one of our 9th grade English teachers) about how the cognitive learning goals in science class connect to the cognitive learning goals in English class. What grew out of that conversation was the Infographic Project. For this project, I had my students collect data then present it graphically using Infographics such as bar graphs, a column graph, a pie chart, or a hierarchy. In addition, I required students to explain how the data compared to other representative data, draw conclusions, and make specific recommendations based on the data they presented.

Click HERE for description of the assignment.

Common Core Standards Addressed: WHST.9-10.6; WHST.9-10.8; WHST.9-10.9

A Social Studies Teacher’s Thoughts Critical Literacy by Colleen Tambuscio

Learning about history offers meaningful and authentic opportunities for students to express their knowledge of the subject matter through writing and discourse. History teachers can benefit from working collaboratively with an English teacher by working together to develop activities that engage students in analyzing and synthesizing content -- then applying those skills to authentic writing opportunities.

This semester, I was presented with a group of students actively engaged in the content and who have expressed, through their development of quality work products, a deeper interest in the subject matter. I decided to approach Mrs. Westbrook with an advanced text on the subject of Nazi ideology for students in an elective course on the Holocaust and Genocide. The text includes the principles of Nazi Ideology that I teach to the students in two classroom lessons. My goal was to engage the students in the chapters that deal with non-Jewish victims, to broaden their historical framework on the subject matter, and to allow students to understand the many layers that encompass Nazi ideology.

Curating an Exhibit in History: To accomplish this goal, Mrs. Westbrook helped me develop the BECOME A CURATOR task with the idea that groups of students will create an exhibit focused on one particular victim group from the Holocaust. For example:

Enemies of the Regime: political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals
Territorial Threats: Polish and Soviet civilians and Polish Prisoners of War
Racial Enemies: Germans with mental and physical disabilities, African Germans and the Roma-Sinti)

Since students often experience history through museum learning, either within the walls of a museum or through online exhibitions, this provides an authentic method of engaging students in learning. To begin, I asked students to utilize a specific chapter in Nazi Ideology and the Holocaust by The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to research their assigned cluster of non-Jewish victims of Nazi oppression. The requirements for the exhibition included the following:

Develop an escalating timeline of events that demonstrate the step by step process by which the particular sub group was marginalized.
Gather and display 4 pieces of propaganda which best illustrated the Nazi ideological principles that placed this group in this category.
Gather 2 documents which demonstrate the systematic nature of the Nazi strategy that marginalized this group of people.
Gather 4 archival photographs to provide documented proof of the specific abuse towards the victim group.
Drawing on previous lessons on Nazi ideology, identify and explain the particular ideology used against the group. (i.e. survival depends upon racial purity, survival depends upon seizure of territory or survival depends on nullifying or eliminating anti-social groups who undermine society and government)
Utilizing the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum through online access of the collections, students will cite in MLA format their sources.
Exhibitions will be presented to students in English classes studying NIGHT utilizing a gallery walk approach.

Click HERE for a description of the assignment.

Common Core Standards Addressed: RH.9-10.3; WHST.9-10.2; WHST.9-10.4; WHST.9-10.5; WHST.9-10.8.

An Art Teacher’s Thoughts on Critical Literacy by Lisette Morel

Writing/Literacy skills in art is crucial if we as educators want to empower our students with the 21st century skills needed to engage and question the world they live in rather than merely occupy a seat on the sidelines in life. As a working artist, I recognize how writing is utilized to convey and make connections for my audience. And like all artists, I use my artist statements to clarify and to provide insight into my work. These statements provide the viewer an inside view into the artistic process and the artist’s thinking.

In the art classroom reading, writing and art making should be happening simultaneously. It is important for my students to acquire background information on artists and to learn the art making process. But it is even more important that they gain expertise in describing, evaluating, and engaging in critical discourse about art. I am not concerned with the regurgitation of art history dates and names and meaningless artist information onto paper. No one needs another report on an artist. What I am more interested in is that my students learn during the creating process. It is important for my students to understand why artists choose certain themes, why they choose certain art processes, why imagery and ideas change, and what connections to world history are apparent. But like my science and social studies colleagues, I too need guidance to develop literacy components that encourage my students to build on their visual imagery and insight.
Writing Artist Statements

Mrs. Westbrook and I have been collaborating to create writing components that support what my students are learning in Art. One such assignment is the creation of Artist Statements to accompany their finished pieces for exhibition. We used exemplar texts from our MOMA fieldtrip as students worked to create statements that mirrored the professional standards of the art world. This assignment gave them experience in articulating their process and in writing clear statements that describe their own intended effect. We then created a rubric that balanced the literacy demands of the Common Core with the content I wanted to see in their finished pieces.

Click HERE for description of the assignment.

Common Core Standards Addressed:WHST.9-10.2; WHST.9-10.4; WHST.9-10.9

Real Literacy/Real Content by Joanna Westbrook

English teachers are the lynchpin for the common core in our buildings – the new standards combine the critical literacy and thinking skills we have been addressing in our instruction for years and challenge us to find new ways for our kids to interact with and learn content. As English teachers, we all know writing in the content area can no longer be centered on tired, recycled 5 paragraph essays our students write year after year – the idea of making the content classes into extensions of the English class just does not have traction.

We as English teachers have to work harder for our colleagues and for students than merely suggesting the same old essay about a scientist for science class, the repetitive research report about a hero for social studies, or the Van Gogh PowerPoint for art class. What we bring to the table when we collaborate with our content colleagues has to be rich and has to push kids to interact with text and present their ideas using the authentic discourse of each discipline. This work is hard and requires us to really listen to our colleagues as they describe the type of reading and writing that will move kids forward within their discipline. In the three tasks we built, you see real content coupled with real literacy in ways that apportion reading/writing throughout the curriculum and that broaden our students’ literacy preparation

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Connecting Within and Beyond

Posted by Unknown Rabu, 29 Agustus 2012 0 komentar

The other day I had a discussion with Colleen Tambuscio, one of my teachers, where she was actively sharing some of the innovative ideas she planned to implement during the upcoming school year. Colleen is the architect of our globally recognized Holocaust Education Program. During our conversation, she shared with me her experience with Today’s Meet at a recent professional development program hosted by the Shoah Foundation in California. In a nutshell, Today’s Meet was used as a live backchannel throughout the program and the entire conversation was archived for reference. Now I had heard of this tool in the past, but had never used it up to this point.

Colleen was so excited about the potential of this tool at New Milford High School that she asked if I could create a room for our staff to collaborate, ask/answer questions, to provide each other support, as well as share resources, professional development opportunities, ideas, and student work. I did so right away and in minutes I had created a room that will be open for a year. It is our hope that Today’s Meet will further build collegiality through connected learning while being a catalyst for innovation, support, and dialogue focused on improving the teaching and learning process.

This conversation couldn’t have come at a better time. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the importance of connected learning. In that post, George Couros asked me what I was going to do to empower my staff to be more actively involved in meaningful sharing and connecting with educators outside my school. It is my hope that integrating this simple tool to enhance connections within our own building will expose my staff to the many possibilities and benefits of not just connecting within, but also beyond. I can assure George that I will be gently pushing for greater connections beyond once my staff becomes more comfortable interacting in a more or less open environment.

How do you encourage connected learning in your schools? What strategies have you found successful to empower educators to share and connect with their peers beyond school walls?

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Perspectives - Looking Back...Thinking Forward

Posted by Unknown Senin, 06 Juni 2011 0 komentar

The following is a summary by New Milford High School teacher Colleen Tambuscio on this year's Holocaust Study Tour. The post speaks for itself in terms of the impact this authentic learning experience has on our students as well as people all over the world.

The Holocaust Study Tour always provides new and exciting learning opportunities because, although there is an itinerary, the schedule flexes as new educational experiences arise. However, this year, our group expanded to 22 students, the largest ever. While learning about the history of the Holocaust, we became more than just a group of students and teachers. We became a family.

One of the many highlights was the opportunity to meet Eva Vavrencka, the daughter of Felicitas (Lici) Wolf Garda. Lici was the sister of Otto Wolf in theDiary of Otto Wolf (required reading prior to the trip). We are so grateful that Eva, who has never spoken in public about her family's history, was willing to meet with us at our hotel in Prague. We discovered many new aspects of the story including that Otto's diary was smuggled out of Czechoslovakia and brought to America in the 1970's by Lici's half brother, Thomas Mandl. Eva was able to give us insight into Lici's post-Holocaust life, and we are incredibly grateful to Eva for bringing this history from Salvaged Pages to life.

As always, Pavel Stransky continues to inspire us each year telling his story and guiding us to Theresienstadt, the camp where he and his wife, Vera, were interned before being sent to Auschwitz. As Pavel talked to our students, all 22 pairs of eyes were riveted to his face. Pavel, now 90 years old, compassionately and bravely tells of his time in both Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Tears flowed down the faces of our 22 teenage children, who are now barely younger than Pavel was when the Holocaust began. All day our students approached Pavel and gave him hugs, posed for pictures and asked questions. We are thankful for Pavel’s friendship and the important historical and personal lessons he gives us.

This year the Olomouc Jewish Community invited us to celebrate the Passover Seder with them. Welcomed by Petr and his grandfather, Milos Dobry, our own Sarah Schrenzel sang the four questions in Hebrew. What an incredible evening: first listening to Milos tell his story of surviving Auschwitz; then celebrating what, for many of us, was our first Passover Seder; and finally, being able to share in this experience with the Jewish Community of Olomouc, which includes many of the Holocaust survivors that we interviewed during last year’s Holocaust Study Tour. How thankful we are that the Olomouc Jewish Community is helping us next year with our dedication at Trsice.

A new facet to our relationship with the community of Trsice was the presentation of a special pin by Colonel Zuffa-Kunci of the Czechoslovak Legions in Olomouc, to our group’s leader Colleen Tambuscio, in recognition of the special relationship which has developed between the Czech people in the Olomouc region and American students through the Holocaust Study Tour program. We have been working with the local community to further commemorate this story by building a memorial to mark the site of the underground hideouts in which the villagers of Trsice hid the Wolf family for three years during the Holocaust.

The most unexpected learning opportunity occurred inside the villa of Amon Goeth, commandant of Plaszow Concentration Camp, where Spielberg filmed parts of Schindler's List. After visiting the area of the camp where today lay the ruins of the Jewish Burial Hall and a memorial to Sarah Schenirer (this is the area of the camp that the HST 2009 participants cleaned up), we walked to the villa of Amon Goeth. While looking at the house from the street, we saw a gentleman come out of the doorway and wave us up the walkway. We, of course, approached the house with Shalmi, our historian for the trip, and Ewa, our Polish guide, and immediately took him up on his offer to come inside. This was an incredible chance meeting that demonstrates the importance of experiential learning and its possibility for rare opportunities that become profound teachable moments.

New this year was our overnight hotel stay at Auschwitz--actually in the town Osweicim. We entered the town, passing by Auschwitz I, which is now a museum, and also passing through Auschwitz III, the industrial complexes of Monowitz and Buna. The hotel and town center are just down the street. It is impossible to believe that anyone who lived here during World War II can say they didn't know what was happening in these camps. By the time our group reached Auschwitz, we had bonded completely. Before dinner, we debriefed about our visit in Trsice, and ended the session with a giant family hug.

Each night we ended our day of learning with journaling and discussion, and of course, the blog. Our blog has taken on an important, impactful role in the Holocaust Study Tour. Not only is the blog a way for us to focus and communicate what we are learning as we travel, it is has tremendous impact on student learning. Each night we choose students to post their reactions to the day, using their reflections from their journals. Our followers post comments, and students react and really process their learning.

The Holocaust Study Tour is unlike classroom learning not only because students experience the history through firsthand encounters, but also because they learn that history is dynamic, and that as time passes, we unearth more of the history. History is not just about the pages in a textbook. History is the story of real, living people, like Pavel Stransky, Mrs. Ohera, and Eva Vavrencka. The history lessons will continue to impact all of us who journeyed together in our Holocaust Study Tour 2011 family.

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Google Docs & Apps: Putting the Pedagogical Pieces Together

Posted by Unknown Senin, 19 April 2010 0 komentar

As part of my action plan associated with becoming a Google Certified Teacher, I decided to focus on training other educators about integrating these powerful web 2.0 applications into their instruction. Outside of my role as Principal of New Milford High School, I am the Director of Program Development for Project ABLE International. This is an organization committed to assisting teachers develop authentic-based learning environments in order to provide students with essential 21st Century problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Currently teachers from four different school districts in northern NJ are part of the Project ABLE consortium and have been receiving intense, hands-on training during the course of the 2009-2010 school year. This training has focused on the philosophy, development, and implementation of authentic-based learning activities that are meaningful and relevant to the learner.

As a culminating activity after months of training we decided to illustrate how easily Google Docs and Apps could be integrated into ABLE's in order to foster collaboration and interactivity between the participants. I worked on and develivered the presentation with Keith Devereaux, a science teacher at NMHS who has embraced the use of Google Docs and Apps in my school. We also included Dr. Brian Chinni, Founder and CEO of the Madison Institute that developed Project ABLE. In our development of the presentation we worked collaboratively over the course of a few weeks using the very tools that we would be providing training on. While Keith and I had some face to face contact time, all of Brian's pieces were submitted using Google Docs and Sites. The final result was the creation of a Google Site that included a simple agenda, presentation, and an authentic jigsaw activity where the participants have to create a informative presentation to their home districts using Google Doc and Apps.

Overall we were very satisfied by our presentation and feel that we met all of the objectives that we set. After reflecting we discovered many ways in which to improve the delivery of the conent and have already begun to make adjustments that will make the presentation even more powerful. One thing is certain, all of the educators present experienced the limitless potential that comes with these tools once they investigated each piece and then put them all together. Please take time to visit the Google Site (Project ABLE and Docs) we created and provide us with some feedback!

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