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(Posters made with Adobe Spark)

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Module 8: I have organized this Padlet to address the "Why" we need these tools, and then showcase some tools and "how" they can be used.
This Curation is divided into 3 Parts:
1. Why technology and tools are necessary for 21st Century Learning
2. Toolkit of Technology Tools with some examples
3. Another avenue to promoting 21st century learning with hands-on tools: Makerspaces

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Part 1: Why Technology and techonology tools are important for 21st century learners

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Part 1: Why Technology and techonology tools are important for 21st century learners

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Below are 10 SKILLS for the Future that focus on the UNIQUENESS of Human Intelligence compared with machines. These skills can be taught and supported through partnerships within the School Library. Every one of these skills can be addressed through the use of technology tools.

1. Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed.
2. Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions.
3. Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based.
4. Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings.
5. Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and understand database reasoning.
6. New-media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses digital forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication.
7. Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines.
8. Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes.
9. Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for
importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques.
10. Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team.
(The list of Skills can be found from http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/front//docs/sponsored/phoenix/future_work_skills_2020.pdf)

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One way to teach 21st Century Skills: Inquiry Based Learning? 

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One way to teach 21st Century Skills: Inquiry Based Learning? 

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John Spencer explains and has some great ideas on getting IBL started. As we are encouraging our students to be inquirers and designers, it is increasingly important that we teach them the skills so they know "how" to learn rather than focus on the content of "what" to learn.
p.s. I really like how the creator of this video uses examples from Harry Potter to explain the need for inquiry-based learning!

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Inquiry-Based Learning: The Ultimate Guide

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Teaching 21st Century Skills: Project-based Learning

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Teaching 21st Century Skills: Project-based Learning

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This great article from Mindshift explains the 6 elements of Project Based Learning - which can complement inquiry and design.
1. Intellectual challenge & achievement
2. Authenticity
3. Public Product
4. Collaboration
5. Project Management
6. Reflection

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Two high school students construct a wind turbine. ( Courtesy of Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action)

Elizabeth Vega teaches pre-kindergarten at Loma Verde Elementary in Novato, California. Her school and district leaders want to do more project-based learning and have invested in getting teachers like Vega some training. That means she took one workshop on project-based learning, got excited about the possibilities, and then was sent back to her classroom to try it out.

"It sounded all great when they talked us through it," Vega said, but when she got back to her classroom, and only had her notes for pointers, the whole endeavor became overwhelming. That didn't stop Vega from trying, but the first project she and her team teachers implemented didn't go at all how they'd planned.

'One of the most common things that's missing from what people call projects is that it's not intellectually challenging.' Bob Lenz, Executive Director of the Buck Institute

The team noticed the school's garden was dying and they thought it would be neat for students to design a new watering system. But the kids didn't care about the project at all. They just said, "use the hose." Vega wasn't entirely sure they even fully understood the problem, but she could tell they weren't engaged in solving it, so her team ended up dropping the project.

"I think it was eye-opening for us," Vega said. It was a clear example of why students need a voice in the design process, something Vega remembers from her training, but that somehow got glossed over when the teachers sat down to plan. "We need to have that conversation with our students first and ask them what problems we're having at Loma Verde. That way they have voice in that process," Vega said.

This first hiccup hasn't deterred Vega. When she's had success she can clearly see students are engaged with projects. She does wish she had more support as a way to check the things she's trying against best practices. She'd really like to have a project-based learning coach, but if she can't have that, she'd like tools to help her reflect on how to improve.

"I think teachers crave resources," Vega said. "Right now they feel like they don't have the tools, and we don't even know where to start."

There are a lot of teachers in the same position as Vega. Interest in project-based learning has exploded, and the practice can now be found in some form or another all over the United States. But while interest in projects is high, a deep understanding of what makes project work meaningful and impactful to students is less ubiquitous.

"People are calling a lot of things project-based learning that aren't necessarily high quality learning experiences for kids," said Bob Lenz, executive director of the Buck Institute for Education. That's a concern for many educators, like Lenz, who have worked on project-based learning for decades and know there's danger in an education trend that goes wild, but isn't implemented well.

"It could be just another wave of PBL that came and went," Lenz said. That's why the Buck Institute convened a broad range of teachers, education leaders, policy groups, foundation representatives, international stakeholders and others to design "A Framework For High Quality Project Based Learning."

To write this document, a core group of educators who have taught with projects for a long time wrote a draft and got feedback from the convened stakeholders. They made revisions and then put the new draft out for public comment. They got a few thousand comments within the U.S. and globally, which they used to revise once again. The third iteration went back to the steering committee for final sign-off and touch-ups.

"It wasn't too hard to find consensus, but some of the challenge was, 'are we describing what teachers are doing or are we describing what kids are doing?'" Lenz said. Ultimately, the steering group decided that there are plenty of existing materials focused on teachers, but few that describe what student learning looked like in a high quality project-based learning environment. Lenz hopes that by focusing on students, parents can also use the framework to hold schools accountable.

The framework is built around six basic elements that the framers believe must be present: intellectual challenge and accomplishment, authenticity, public product, collaboration, project management and reflection.

"One of the most common things that's missing from what people call projects is that it's not intellectually challenging," Lenz said. He acknowledges that progressive educators often criticize the Buck Institute for coaching teachers that projects should be standards-based, but Lenz said that's one way to make sure the projects aren't disconnected from content.

The Mission Project - which until recently was common for fourth graders in California schools - is a good example of "project" that doesn't hold up under this framework. Usually students learn a lot of history about how the missions in California came to be, and then as an afterthought they build a model mission. The "project" part could be completed by a parent or bought off the shelf. It has very little connection to the learning. This is what some educators call a "dessert project" - it comes after the learning. And according to the new framework, it's not really project-based learning.

"The big ah-ha for a lot of teachers in our workshops is that projects can be about academic content," Lenz said. "It's often seen as something after kids have learned their academic content." But there are other misconceptions as well.

"A lot of new models are oriented, and have as part of their espoused design, that they want to use personalized learning and skill-based work so kids can do project-based learning," Lenz said. He's describing a strain of the "personalized learning" movement that uses online playlists to move students through content, but also tries to blend projects in as demonstrations of learning.

"I don't think they're very clear on what makes high quality PBL," Lenz said. That's where the authenticity and public product standards come into play. If the project doesn't mirror the ways people work in the real world then it isn't authentic, according to Lenz.

"When PBL is done really well the context engages kids and then teachers can apply the same strategies they might have used out of context to kids who are a little more engaged," Lenz said. He emphasized that teachers have to give students structure and support to get good outcomes, especially when students haven't experienced projects before.

"The process is what it should be all about," Lenz said. But in order to move beyond content, teachers have to be clear about teaching skills like setting goals and making action plans, and then teachers have to assess those skills as they would content. As with anything else in the classroom, project-based learning teachers can't assume kids already have the skills.
DEEPENING PROJECTS
Telannia Norfar teaches high school math at Northwest Classen High School in Oklahoma City - where she was also a student. She's had a few careers before teaching, but since she entered the classroom 11 years ago she's been using project-based learning. Norfar is on the steering committee that worked to create the High Quality Project Based Learning Framework.

"With so many practitioners who have been in the project world - and did it even when it wasn't popular in education - for all of them to come together and come up with common language will be really helpful," Norfar said.

Norfar's district isn't big on project-based learning and for a long time she didn't have any colleagues who were interested in collaborating with her. But she has continued to use projects to teach the most important math concepts, the ones she really wants students to nail, for one simple reason - she says it works.

"When I think of what is the magic sauce for me, it's the public audience or public product piece," Norfar said. "It happens every time, no matter what the project is, as long as it's outside our four walls, they do amazing stuff."

Norfar doesn't want to simplify the many important pieces of quality projects, but she also doesn't want interested teachers to feel so overwhelmed they never start trying. She finds a lot of her math projects by talking to people outside of education. In social situations, on airplanes, at networking events for other professions, she asks professionals how they actually use math in their work. She builds projects from there.

"You can start with your friends, especially if you didn't come from a family where everybody is a teacher," Norfar said. Many math teachers, she said, haven't used math in a profession; they were just good math students. To help students see relevance in math, and to empower them to make a difference with the knowledge they are gaining, Norfar wants them to use math in authentic ways.

Norfar has done financial planning projects, architectural design projects, aerospace engineering projects (inspired by a conversation about matrices with an engineer on a plane), and she's currently exploring a chemistry related project with a professor friend.

Norfar says every year it's the projects that change students' minds about their future in mathematics. She remembers one student in a pre-AP class who was struggling. As a class they worked on a project to design a new house for a family that was outgrowing theirs. The student's father worked in construction, and he helped her draw plans that were blueprint quality. "And it inspired her to become an architect," Norfar said.

One misperception Norfar sees among many colleagues who are skeptical of project-based learning is the belief that everything has to fit into a project. Norfar says she only spends time on projects for the standards that are most important. To decide, she used the book "Power Standards" to get at the heart of her content standards. She breaks out the six most important units and spends a month on each of them.

"It looks like we're covering a lot, but even inside of it we intentionally said we really need to introduce this to help them understand, but it's not the diehard thing," Norfar said. She's finally got an algebra teaching team interested in collaborating and it is intentionally spiraling back to the idea of the line, what it is and what it isn't, because it's a foundational algebraic idea.

"I could either pretend that I'm really getting through it or I could really care about a few things. And less is always more," Norfar said. A good example is vocabulary words like domain, range, independent, dependent, discrete and continuous. These words help students talk about the performance tasks Norfar gives them, but they aren't the "diehard thing."

Norfar admits that it has been a long journey to get to a place where she's comfortable owning her content in this way; and she's still improving. Right now, her focus is on improving how she works reflection into her classes. She says teaching with high quality projects means always believing you can improve.

"I would never say I've got this down. That's not possible. There's always room to grow," Norfar said. She's surprised sometimes about how resistant her colleagues are to change. "I'm like, 'the world changes, you have to change too,' " she said.

That's why as much as Norfar wants all projects to involve all six of the elements set out in the framework, on a practical level she just wants people to try something new. And she's worried that unless the value of project-based learning is assessed with more than just tests many educators will abandon it.

"I'm so concerned that we will be the next fad for education," Norfar said. "I'll be honest, I have some of the same test scores as the teacher next to me who does not do PBL." But she doesn't think the tests reveal the ways students are growing as people and thinkers when they're engaged in projects. She wishes there were other metrics for the type of growth she sees.

"My students are so much more prepared once they leave high school than the teacher next door who got the test results, but his kids don't know how to work together," she said.

The Six Must-Have Elements Of High Quality Project-Based Learning

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The Six Must-Have Elements Of High Quality Project-Based Learning

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Elizabeth Vega teaches pre-kindergarten at Loma Verde Elementary in Novato, California. Her school and district leaders want to do more project-based learning and have invested in getting teachers like Vega some training. That means she took one workshop on project-based learning, got excited about the possibilities, and then was sent back to her classroom to try it out.

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Part 2: Why the library is a great place to introduce technology tools

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Part 2: Why the library is a great place to introduce technology tools

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The Library Learning Commons is the hub of the school. Often a computer lab is stationed in or beside the library, and other technologies (laptop carts or iPads) may be available to sign out through the library.
When classes are conducting research - perhaps for an inquiry project - they often begin in the library. This allows an open door for the Teacher Librarian to introduce the classroom teacher and students to technology tools that can assist in the research and in the presentation, where students can "show what they know" in a creative way.

Many of the tools are free, but some that I have selected may require a school to purchase or subscribe.

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Current info on websites and apps that are useful for teachers and/or
I really like that this site is updated regularly!

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Free Technology For Teachers – A TeacherMeade site

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Tools for teachers: Untangling the Web: 

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Tools for teachers: Untangling the Web: 

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This resource by Stephen E. Dembo and Adam S. Bellow provides many links to websites and apps for educational uses. There are also some great tutorials.

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Tip: Click on each link to expand and view the content. Click again to collapse. See the Authors in ActionComing Soon!

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This is a fantastic site! It provides lessons and videos to use in a K-12 classroom The videos are attractive, up to date, and engaging.
For example, a teacher may search for a video to introduce a poetry unit, or supplement an Ancient Civilization lesson. There are no ads on this site (like YouTube!).

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TED-Ed celebrates the ideas of teachers and students around the world. Discover hundreds of animated lessons, create customized lessons, and share your big ideas.

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This is a software program that a school can purchase to help students in the organization of their thoughts and planning of their work.
My school has a subscription and the students learn to use it in their "Digital Literacy" class.

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Use these Thinking and Planning Examples to Integrate Inspiration Into Your Curriculum | inspiration.com

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Inspiration® applies visual learning methodologies that engage students' learning in language arts, science and social studies and support planning and thinking. Use these examples and resources to help you start using Inspiration with confidence and creativity. Download a free 30-day trial of Inspiration today!

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A tool that helps teachers curate resources for students: Blendspace

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A tool that helps teachers curate resources for students: Blendspace

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This tool allows teachers to keep in one spot various texts, web links, videos and images to teach a lesson, or to have students follow independently.
Students may also post to it as well.
I really enjoy the flexibility of Padlet, but Blendspace is another tool that is high on my list to use as a tool in my teaching and to recommend to colleagues.

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15 Ideas to motivate students using Tes Teach with Blendspace

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Check out these fun, easy ideas to engage students using TES Teach with Blendspace, a free tool to create interactive lessons, activities, and more with digital content! Compiled by teacher Mike Gershon, these ideas will refocus your students on learning.

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A tool for teachers and students: Symbaloo  

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A tool for teachers and students: Symbaloo  

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This site allows the user to bookmark pages by creating a Webmix.
A teacher can also create a lesson for students to follow independently with "learning paths". The learning path has the feel of a video game. A teacher could set up a series of videos, readings, images and place questions to quiz the student as they complete each step.

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Symbaloo: Bookmarks & Favorites - The #1 Homepage for Educators

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Easily save, share, and organize your favorites with Symbaloo; the best online bookmark manager for educators. Use Symbaloo as a homepage on any browser or Internet-enabled device. Create a free account today!

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Teacher and Student tool: Google Cultural Institute

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Teacher and Student tool: Google Cultural Institute

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This link takes the viewer into a large number of art museums and cultural sites around the world. For example, students can visit Machu Picchu or the British Museum.

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Google Arts & Culture is a non-profit initiative. We work with cultural institutions and artists around the world. Together, our mission is to preserve and bring the world's art and culture online so it's accessible to anyone, anywhere.

Experience art and culture in new ways

Discover our latest technologies and meet the people, visit the places and learn about the events that continue to shape our world.

Learn more

Partner with us
Our team helps partners digitize, manage and publish their collections online, all for free. Find out how to join, and who's already working with us.
Learn more

Our latest news

Teaching with Google Arts & Culture

A dedicated Teacher Guide is now available. It aims to make learning with Arts & Culture in class easier than ever.

Learn more

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Google Arts & Culture is a non-profit initiative. We work with cultural institutions and artists around the world. Together, our mission is to preserve and bring the world's art and culture online so it's accessible to anyone, anywhere. Discover our latest technologies and meet the people, visit the places and learn about the events that continue to shape our world.

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I have been using this site to create posters with favourite quotations from the course readings this semester. Recently I tried making a video using some of my notes. I made this short video in about 30 minutes. It is user-friendly, allowing one to insert text, upload photos or videos, as well as providing access to free images. The audio tool is easy to use, and encourages short (about 10 second) audio clips.
This is the site I am most often recommending to my students.
Example: A short video explaining the 5 modes of "texts" (Made by me with Adobe Spark)

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My students and I were looking for a tool that allowed us to make infographics to display the information they had gathered. A few students came across this site that allows the creation of video infographics. It is possible to make a good video using the free site, but it looks like there is a much larger ranger of tools available if one subscribes to the site.

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Animaker, Make Animated Videos on Cloud for free

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Animaker is an online do-it-yourself (#DIY) animation video maker that brings studio quality presentations within everyone's reach. Animated Videos, Done Right!

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Biteable is a free site that allows teachers and students to make short videos. One of my students wanted to make an infographic video and introduced me to this site.

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Video made with Biteable. The World's Simplest Video Maker

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Mathical.org encourages the reading of books that promote a love for math. A great place to find links between what students are learning in one curricular area, and use a text to support it.

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The Mathical Book Prize is an annual award for fiction and nonfiction books that inspire children to see math in the world around them.

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Part 3: Makerspace as a place to integrate technology tools

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Part 3: Makerspace as a place to integrate technology tools

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Some other suggested names for the school library are: Learning Labs, Creation Station or the Hub of Learning. If students are encouraged to explore, be curious and creative, then we should support the integration of Makerspaces in our libraries.
I've included some information here at the end of this curation because I'm not sure where to put it yet... I want to keep these ideas in mind as I encourage learners and provide them with tools to be inquirers and designers.

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Sample questions for youth: (from the Youth Maker Space Playbook)

What do you enjoy doing most when you have free time?

Is there anything that you’d really love to build, make, and/or invent?

What are the things you see yourself good at when it comes to helping others?

In what ways do you enjoy helping people the most?

What are you curious about?

What are some things you’re most excited to learn or get better at?

Is there anything that makes you nervous that you’d like more practice and help with?

Think about your favorite space (a room in your home or school, or even a space outside). Why is it your favorite? What do you like about it?

If you could add anything to your favorite space, what would it be and why?