Charter Schools in Maine

After many years resisting the development of charter schools, the Maine Legislature has passed Charter School Legislation and Governor LePage has signed LD 1553 into law. Two features of the legislation are particularly interesting:

7. Teachers – All full-time teachers in charter schools must either hold an appropriate teaching certificate or become certified within three years of the date they are hired, excepting those with an advanced degree, professional certification, or unique expertise and/or experience in the curricular area they teach. ...
...
9. Virtual Chartered Schools – LD 1553 adopts the language of the national model bill that defines and allows virtual chartered schools.

I'm interested to see how these develop.

ITeam Project Support

Last spring, ITeam built a green screen to support projects. From that modest start, students and teachers across our district have started to use green screen technologies.

Ari Bader-Natal blogged about Education 2.0 being on the Radar. From there, I found Dale Dougherty's blog and links to Make Magazine. We often borrow tripods and make do. Could ITeam members make projects like this, too?

Mobile Document Camera Stand

Jacob and Ian created windblades that were a similar level of complexity for the Maine Windblade Challenge. So, I suspect we need to find the right matches of projects and access to resources. We have a similar challenge in finding ways to support the matching for Capstone Projects. In fact, Make Magazine, or other venues like it, could be both sources of projects and places to authentically share innovate Capstone Projects.

Progress building capacity - Capstone

Met with both Capstone Pilot students and with MAMS ITeam today and got encouraging signs of students developing their understanding and capacity to undertake more challenging work:

Capstone:

• Sara inspired us with her descriptions of Capstone work she already has underway.
• Several students have already sent out inquiry email messages and have been waiting patiently for responses that have not yet come. They are ready to pick up the phone to see whether they can get better responses that way.
• Dan said that his jazz ensemble had just produced a performance CD. They are now looking for more gigs. Noted the challenge of getting members out of school for Capstone performances. We briefly discussed video and other ways to share the performance part.
• Haley described what she wants to do and Sara was able to help her with knowledge and experience that she has developed from her parallel work at Maine Region Ten. Sara offered to introduce Haley to her teacher at Maine Region Ten. We paused to reflect how this is a very important example of how we can scale this operation: share knowledge and share process so that others can appreciate it and extend.
• Nick described his plan to find and execute off-season conditioning but then went on to say that he planned to integrate his work in the WebTeam class with his Capstone Project. He (and others?) will build a web site to share appropriate parts of his conditioning portfolio.
• Luke tried to contact the Marine Resources Officer in order to get expert assistance with learning about and working on the invasive species challenges.
• ...

We are using a Facebook group MTA Capstone Pilot to support some of our work on the Pilot. We chose Facebook because students already use it and check it more frequently than other ways of communicating. Since Facebook limits access, we will need to make a special effort to share with broader communities.

Japanese Knotweed (Bamboo) on Harpswell Neck Road

Luke is interested in human impact on local environments. We needed a context shot for the Capstone Pilot video clips. The invasion of Japanese Knotweed (Bamboo) on school grounds and here, along Harpswell Neck Road illustrates an important human impact on our local environments.


View Vital Signs Japanese Knotweed in a larger map

Can Capstone Projects help to educate people and manage invasive species?

Karen Cator: Professional Development Needs

Karen Cator spoke at Education Week's Leadership Forum "Unleashing Technology to Personalize Learning," held October 5, 2010, in Washington, for district-level personnel charged with maximizing the effectiveness of technology in education.

As part of her presentation she described new strategies for professional development. She said (starting at 1:22),

Every profession today needs to be a learning profession.
...
We need to get more thoughtful about the kinds of professional development that we provide. One kind ... that we need to provide is professional development in how to create a new generation of assignments. What are the most compelling, interesting and engaging assignments, where the students can leverage the technology to do those assignments and get that work done? And, it doesn't mean the teacher has to be an expert on what to point and click on within the context of the technology but that they are really expert on how to create engaging and compelling assignments for students.

View the entire video at this link.



How do we leverage the work of teachers innovating and ITeam members who are ready and willing to help prototype assignments?

NXT, AppInventor and ?! [1st DRAFT]

Interrobang invites students to participate in missions and share their work as deeds that are reviewed before publication on their website http://playinterrobang.com. Ariel and I are evaluating the environment by submitting a collaborative mission. Interrobang held our work in limbo for more than three days.

Sunday evening they returned access to our work with a request to revise before they will accept it. The reviewer suggested that we add some video to our contribution.

Deed Needs Revisions

The deed you submitted for the mission "Knowledge Swap" needs some more work before it can be approved. You can keep working on it and submit it again at any time.

Here's what you need to work on:
This is very cool and we want to accept the deed -- but I think it can be much more illuminating to the community if you also upload a little video of what you're doing. Is that possible? We'll give you more points if you do so. Thanks!

So, I am saving it here as part of our development process and evaluation.

-----------------------------
"Ariel M. and I worked together combining her knowledge of NXT and mine of AppInventor"

I am developing experience with AppInventor and track the new features as they are released. When I saw that Liz Looney was developing AppInventor support for NXT robotics, I anticipated that this would be highly engaging for ITeam members.

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/reference/components/legomindstorms.html

Ariel uses NXT robotics outside of school. She showed me how to use the NXT module and test a variety of sensors. For example, she used the ultrasonic distance sensor to determine its range (~1 to 90 inches). We connected it to math by measuring the maximum distance and comparing it with the distance we measured (as 7.5 x 12" tiles on the floor outside he library).

We could make an even more engaged connection with STEM by conducting a more complete comparison of observed (sensor) with measured (tape measure) distances and plotting those for analysis and interpretation. Once ITeam members are sufficiently familiar with the tools, we may be able to help MAMS sixth-grade teachers and Ms. Hogan, the technology integrator, incorporate ideas into the force and motion unit that they are developing.

We were able to connect the phone to the NXT Bluetooth and control both the tone generation and a test motor! Ariel was sufficiently excited that she started building the robot described in the NXT instructions booklet.

12/10/10- Today we worked on adding another motor to the robot. We also took some pictures of what we were doing. Hopefully by next week we will have the motors put together and many more pictures.

InterroBang ?! - A network for student-centered learning?

We need infrastructure to support project- and challenge-based learning that we are doing in both MAMS ITeam and MTA Capstone. We have been exploring and doing action research using AppInventor to control NXT robotics as they roll out new features. We want to share our work with others who might be interested in it.

I learned about ?! (InterroBang: http://playinterrobang.com/) through a message that Jim Matthews posted on the ARISgames group (http://groups.google.com/group/arisgames). I investigated, created an account, selected a mission, created an entry based on current work, invited Ariel, one of our experienced ITeam members, to contribute and help evaluate the system. After we submitted our entry to the system, I wrote the following reflection on the wall of of my user page at InterroBang.

Stephen Spaeth [Note that this link will not take most users to the right page because you need to have an account to get access to this page.] Ariel joined our team and contributed to documenting the deed. She took the picture, wrote the caption, and added text to describe the continuing work we did today. She decided that we were ready to submit the mission and hit the button. Apparently, it takes the deed out of our hands and we no longer have access to the deed. I can understand the need to freeze it during the approval process but I'd still like to be able to see the preview. It is unnerving to loose control over our own creation.
about 18 hours ago

As more time elapses, it becomes clearer that providers of this service need to:

• Make the time-frame for approval process clearer
• Make it clear to users that they will loose access to their own creations
  
• Add the option to cross-post entries to other venues (e. g. to this blog for me) or at least the option to make the entry publicly accessible
  

Ariel thought that we should encourage ITeam members to use this service. I'm pretty sure that we don't want to do that until we resolve some of the outstanding issues.

Update: AppInventor developers and beta users are cranking out useful resources almost every day. For example, Liz Looney shared ShinyLegoNxt, a new source file to demonstrate the new NXT resources.