Lots of great offerings at @Teach21c workshops in NY/SF this June

The School at Columbia University in New York City is hosting another week of workshops at Teach21 from June 16-19. The following week, Teach21 heads west to co-host a week of workshops at Teach21West from June 23-26 at The Hamlin School in San Francisco, CA.

Here are the courses I’m offering at Teach21 in NYC:
Monday, June 16, 2014
3D Designing and Printing (Grades 2-8)
Let’s talk about the basics of a variety of design thinking protocols and explore how to create 3D designs using Tinkercad, Sketchup, and other tools. These 3D files can be exported to a Makerbot Replicator 2 printer while discussing possible integrated project ideas in Math, Science, Art, Social Studies across Upper Elementary and Middle School grades. You’ll leave the workshop with more confidence about the 3D design landscape and how to build a network of teachers interested in designing and making.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014
DIY Learning and Professional Development Opportunities
Discover and experience a variety of models to actively take control of your professional development. Twitter chats, unconferences, webinars, PLNs, digital spaces, and Google Hangouts are just a few of the ways to propel and sustain your (and your faculty’s) personal growth and develop a participatory culture of learners. We invite teachers, curriculum developers, and administrators to come and personalize their learning at this workshop.
This is a half-day workshop from 9:00 – 11:30. Please stay and join us for lunch.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Our Portfolios, Ourselves: Crafting a Digital Portfolio of Your Work as an Educator
Curation is a 21st Century skill, so let’s show how to gather archival evidence of your professional endeavors and classroom projects in a digital portfolio. You’ll learn tips to get started: What to gather? Where to put it? How much will this cost? How to organize it? What settings to use? How to link or embed artifacts? How to connect with others?
This is a half-day workshop offered from 9:00 – 11:30. Please stay and join us for lunch.

There are lots of other great workshops being led by my colleagues about world languages, empathy, numeracy, literacy, blogging, wellness, iPads, lesson planning, maker spaces, and more. There’s even a session on how a 5th grade teacher is using our in-house Independent Reading Site — Marisa Guastaferro Mendez and I won an award for the original IRS which we co-created using Google Sites in 2007 and used for many years. Then, Cristina Martinez retooled the site with Drupal in 2013 to be more visually arresting and appealing. It’s awesome to know that this tool is still being actively used to build community and offer a space for collaborating and social networking about literacy.

Yoshiko Maruiwa’s super simple guide for 6th graders to take better photos of their artwork

See the full gallery on Posterous

Yoshiko Maruiwa is a member of the 6th grade faculty team here at The School at Columbia University. She teaches Art, and it is a pleasure to collaborate with her on a few different projects each year. After a unit, Yoshiko tries to have the kids take photos of their artwork to load onto shared albums on The Gallery (our in-house photo server powered by Drupal). They then “point” to these images when writing posts on their personal digital portfolio of their work.

Recently, 6th graders completed mosaics – which correlated with their study of Islam and Islamic art. Yoshiko created the following simple slide show for students to use as a guide for taking better photographs of their finished tiles.

6th graders added Art posts to their digital portfolio created with Google Sites

Yesterday, I was in Yoshiko Maruiwa‘s art classes to help 6th graders add three posts to their personal digital portfolio (created in Google Sites). Yoshiko takes photos of all their finished work and creates albums on The Gallery. (The Gallery is our internal photo server powered by Drupal.) Kids include an image of their work along with an artist statement that explains their process, idea, challenges, successes, curricular connections, and anything else they want to include to curate their work. For today’s class, the students made a post for their Art Self Portrait, Art Tessellation, and Art Circle Design.

To organize all the posts from their 6th grade year, kids created an Announcements page named 2011-2012. As each post is written, it snaps into place in the sidebar index and is arranged alphabetically. Hence, I have them title their posts starting with the subject. I like this better than creating a new page/section for each subject. This way there are less clicks to get to examples of their work, and there is no danger of having pages without any projects on them.

During the course of our discussion, we talked about:

1. Their invisible audience – while access to the kids’ digital portfolios is limited to users on our school’s GoogleApps domain, everyone in the community has an account. At any moment, their work could be viewed by students, teachers, administrators, parents, and anyone with access to a username/password. This should influence what they write (informative without being super personal) and how they write (grammatically correct).
2. Appropriate commenting – write a comment that is specific and/or can initiate a discussion. Something like, “I liked your use of color” or “I see you painted a guitar. Do you play any other instruments?”
3. Inserting an image by linking to the URL of the image online rather than taking a screen snapshot or dragging a copy of the image to the desktop. By using the URL, students can simply point to something else online. The alternative is to copy/take/steal a version of it which is tantamount to theft (depending on how the work is licensed).

5th graders are updating their #GoogleSites digital portfolios in preparation for parent conferences

All students in grades 3-8 at The School at Columbia University are keeping a personal digital portfolio created with GoogleSites. I wrote an earlier post here about how we are using a really simple Announcements template to organize their New Posts.

Today, I worked with 5th graders in Dena Rothstein‘s class to gather some of their work and archive it digitally. We talked about labeling their posts with the subject so that they align alphabetically and clustered by subject in the sidebar. Kids wrote about their Spanish calacas, Spanish altars, Math locker problem, Math Handshake problem, and more.

Kids either took pictures using PhotoBooth on their MacBooks or with an external point-and-shoot camera. Dena provided them with a short list of writing prompts: Describe the process, Describe any challenges, Describe what you makes you proud…