Covid 19: When Virtual School Is Your Only Option

When Shanghai, China educators Dennis Grice and Daniel Mendes suddenly found themselves stranded amidst the Covid 19 outbreak and far far from the Concordia International School they faced the duel fears of an unknown virus and how they would continue the education of their students.

Millions of teachers across the globe are in their shoes right now. Luckily for most of us, we are at least at home with access to our school-issued technology. Dennis was on a beach in the Philipines with not much more than a gym bag of shorts and t-shirts and an iPad. We all still face the unknown.

Thankfully, these two gentlemen were recently in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the MACUL Conference to share their journey and provide the rest of us with tremendous insight for moving forward with virtual learning. They were also joined virtually by a true sage in the educational community, Rushton Hurley. Rushton has been working with schools in Asia to help their teachers make the same adjustments.

Honestly, this was one of the best conference sessions I have ever attended and the trio was gracious enough to record their session for all of us. I cannot recommend its viewing enough. First, it lays out a set of realistic expectations and secondly it is reassuring that we will are all capable of figuring out how to do something nobody learned in some undergrad methods class.

Check out as well their very helpful file of resources. 

We can do this everybody. We just need to be huge for our kids and incredibly empathetic. Thanks again Dennis, Daniel, and Rushton.

Great Slate of Featured Speakers Highlights #MACUL19

The MACUL conference is always a highlight of my teaching year. This March's edition is in Detroit and features a great slate of featured speakers, many who have shared at MACUL for numerous years.

Check out the featured speakers page at MACUL.org for more details and individual bios for the presenters pictured below.

Follow them on social media to connect in the coming weeks' run-up to the conference.

Kasey Bell - @ShakeUpLearning
Adam Bellow - @adambellow
Richard Byrne - @rmbyrne
Leslie Fisher - @lesliefisher
Abbey Futrell - @AbbeyFutrell
Ronen Habib -  @Roni_Habib
Rushton Hurley - @rushtonh
Thomas Murray - @thomascmurray
Joe Sanfelippo - @joe_sanfelippo
Dean Shareski - @shareski
Sarah Wood - @woodsar

Students excel at spoken word project | Thanks PLN and Soundtrap.com

This past Thursday culminated a great project I facilitated with our Pioneer Tech High School students. In their Character Development and Leadership hour I teamed with teacher Amber Lugten to help students pursue what perseverance means to them and then express it in a unique way.

This really turned out to be a tale of the connected educator. Building upon the concepts of the Rock Our World Project founded by fellow Apple Distinguished Educator Carol Anne McGuire, I set off to have students create some type of collaborative music project...probably in Garage Band. Right about the same time I opened Rushton Hurley's Nextvista.org newsletter and he was telling of a similar cloud-based site called Soundtrap.com and discovered it would probably fit our needs better being web based and built for more for sharing than Garage Band. The kids took to the site like a white t-shirt to hot wings and I happily tweeted some of our successes. One of the first people to respond to my tweet was Soundtrap developer Frederik Posse. He liked the project so much that he offered to upgrade all of our accounts, student ones included to premium accounts. This type of extreme project evolution and upgrade doesn't happen for the educator that isn't deeply immersed in a personal learning network.

The kids worked hard and made seemingly thousands of revisions. I was so proud to accompany them on Maranda's Where you Live TV program that highlights all of the great things happening in West Michigan for kids and families.

Here is our segment and below that you'll find a link to Casey and Josh's project and the full write up from WOTV.



Perseverance Soundtrap Project

Students excel at spoken word project | WOTV4women.com.

Autism really speaks in student-made video

"Autism Speaks" is a slogan used by those working hard to raise awareness for the genetic disorder. Their efforts must be applauded but nothing I have seen about life with autism has struck me like the student-made video below.

Rushton Hurley, the undisputed nicest guy in educational technology shared this link from his NextVista.org website with me a couple of weeks ago. What struck me was that this young man, Michael, was sharing his deepest feelings. People with autism struggle mightily understanding emotions and have an even harder time communicating them. In the footnotes, Rushton shares that this 3 and a half minute video took more than seven months for Michael and his teacher Mr. Lozano to produce. This truly is autism speaking.

I have shown this video to a number of third and fourth grade classes. Each time their is pin-drop silence and very thoughtful reflections on Michael's words. One student stated, "You don't have to have autism to feel like Michael." No buddy, you don't.

Take a few minutes to listen to Michael and please share his great message.