Goodbye Snow Day...Hello Virtual Day

     Recently my school district has been struck with some significant winter weather, resulting in three consecutive snow days. While all the students and teachers celebrate and enjoy an unplanned day off of fun in the snow. We are soon struck with a hard reminder come the end of the school year, when it's really beautiful outside, and the year is extended.  

     Schools do their best to create a school calendar that allows for some snow-days, but even the Farmers Almanac has a difficult time predicting exactly when a storm will occur and how much snow will fall. Instead of trying to extend a school year, or lose other vacation time, why not use technology to eliminate the snow day all together?

     Virtual tools like Edmodo, Edublogs, Blogger, or Diigo  offer great ways for schools to provide virtual learning activities for students to accomplish at their leisure during the lazy unplanned day off.  The work provided could be generic content related activities that teachers put together at the beginning of a school year and store away for that snowy day. When the notice goes out for snow day, teachers can fire up their virtual setting, launch the activity and interact with students through set "office hours" on those days. This could count as a learning day and help reduce those extended school years.

     Of course this would require some cooperation between parents, schools, and the students to provide the appropriate tools to access the virtual content. However, with the increase in availability of mobile devices and data networks, many students already have appropriate access. There is always the issue of a power outage, but each scenario could be addressed appropriately at the school level.

Let's get rid of the snow day, and call it a Virtual Day!


References:
Hollignsworth, H. (2011) Virtual Snow Days? Schools Experiment With Online Lesson During Bad Weather. Associated Press. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/YOm60X

School bus image retrieved from http://goo.gl/fgaozn, 2014

Supervised Users in Chrome Beta

Google Chrome (Beta) released a great new feature to supervise other chrome users. Once you sign into Google chrome, you have the option to become a manager of other users who might use Chrome on that workstation. This option has potential for educational purposes. A classroom that has computers available for student use, can be set up with a generic chrome user, or Chromebooks that are used in education can be set up to provide better management of user sessions.

Google provides a great How-To tutorial. There are a few nice things about using supervised users in education:
1) You have better control over monitoring which sites students visit.

2) Managed users are defaulted in a "safe" Google search. Which means that most of the inappropriate content is filter out.

3) Managed users provides you with the opportunity, at the classroom level, to easily adjust what internet sites students can access.

Again, this tutorial from Google is a great resource.

As I explored using this setting, I plan to create one supervised user on my local classroom machine for students. This user will have limited access to some internet sites. There is an option to only allow users to navigate to approved sites. In my science classroom I would tailor these machines to be "Science" machines only, for that user. In other words, the would have access to the Google Apps Domain, and select other sites we use frequently. The other tweak I would make is to change the chrome shortcut will to open the supervised profile by default. To set up the shortcut. Follow these steps.

1) Right click the shortcut icon
2) click properties
3) in the Target box add this to the end of the command
--profile-directory="Profile 1"

(this image is from a linux machine, but the same switch works for mac and windows) 

The text in quotes is the profile you want to open. Usually "Default" is the first user's profile, which will probably be yours. Profile 1 would be the second user added, Profile 2 would be the third...and so on. For my own machines my personal account is Default, and the student supervised account is "Profile 1."

Measuring if Competencies Are Met

      Teachers are always challenged with providing authentic, rigorous lessons, with various types of assessments. These lessons are required to align with the common core, meet 21st century learning objectives, and align with other state or local initiatives. Measuring how well these lessons align with these standards, could be based off individual student assessment data, that illustrates mastery of the appropriate concepts. However, it is difficult to ensure that all these standards are being met throughout the course of the curriculum. 

     The written curriculum would reflect when, where and how these competencies are completed, however there still needs to be some checks and balance system to ensure that the teacher really is aligning their teaching to the written curriculum. Administrators are challenged with the task to monitor teachers to ensure that they are indeed, matching the curriculum and providing the appropriate authentic, rigorous content with appropriate integration of technology to provide real world circumstances to enhance critical thinking and problem solving skills. 

     This all sounds great on paper, but the logistics of actually doing this, are a nightmare. Administrators are burdened with many other responsibilities throughout the day, and allotting appropriate time to monitor teachers is difficult, unless the administration has a large team. In most schools there tends to be one principal, and maybe an assistant principal. Ensuring that all competencies are met is difficult to accomplish, so administrators capture a snapshot of teaching through brief observations. Typically, these observations provide a skewed perspective into the teachers everyday interactions. Students tend to act much different when eh Principal is in the room, so lessons tend to run much more smooth, and objectives are easily met. Ideally, observations should occur through a variety of lenses, including the physical observation, some video of lessons, and or audio of selected lessons. These different perspectives may provide a different view to determine if competencies are met. But still, how do you measure that the competency is in fact met and how can you ensure that the technology competencies are actually met? 

     To be able to measure whether these competencies are met, there has to be some type of tangible artifact to be used as evidence. The student will need to create some artifact that can be presented individually or as a larger part of a portfolio to prove if they have met the appropriate common core standards, as well as the appropriate NETS standards. 

     For example, the English department is working toward the NETS-T standard Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity by asking the students to create an original fictional digital story using a tool like PowToon. The lesson provides a current tool where students have the opportunity to be creative and innovative to present their material in a unique way. However, the focus of the lesson is based on meeting this common core standard CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.3. Ideally the teachers will have some type of assessment tool that will be appropriate aligned to the common core standard to measure students progress with writing effective narratives with enough detail to provide context and sequence. Using the animation tool may not necessarily align directly to the written language, so how could the teacher incorporate this tool into this standard to ensure that the common core is being met and a NETS-T standard is being met and be able to provide a tangible piece of evidence to an administrator to prove that the student met both the common core and the NETS-T standard?